How to Block Ads on Your iPhone, iPad, and Laptop Easily, Effectively, and for Free

I have been using uBlock Origin for many years on my Mac.  Recently, I tried replacing my 2015 MacBook Pro with a 2018 MacBook Pro.  There were a lot of things that I liked about the new MacBook Pro but what bothered me was that it had only 8GB of RAM whereas the older one had 16GB.

I would listen to the fans howl and eventually I replaced it with a machine I described in The Perfect Mac.  But as happy as I am with my Mac Mini, it's not portable.   So I added an iPad Pro to the mix.  That's been pretty good but the ad blocking on the iPad doesn't seem anywhere as effective.

So I first tried the really technical solution and put PiHole on a Raspberry Pi I had lying around.  That worked mostly and there are some real advantages: with PiHole and your router, you can force Internet of Things like web cams or ChromeCasts or Google Assistants to use your DNS settings even though they're hard-coded to report back to China or Google.

But I found it a little erratic because my router wanted two IP addresses for the DNS servers for redundancy.  So I had to use an address of a different DNS server and there were times that my iPad would use that server.  And, of course, that wouldn't block ads.

I looked into installing a second Raspberry Pi so I could run Pi-Hole on two devices.   Or I could have found some way to put a second IP address on the one Pi. But, in the end, what I found worked best was to remove Pi-Hole and put in the addresses of AdGuard's DNS servers. 

You just need to change your routers DNS server settings to this:

| IPv4 |
| :--: | 
| 94.140.14.14    |
| 94.140.15.15    | 

| IPv6 |
| :--: | 
| 2a10:50c0::ad1:ff |
| 2a10:50c0::ad2:ff |

Once you do this, any of your devices will automatically block ads.  

Downsides?  None that I've found.