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

 Mon Nov 09, 2020, last updated Thu Mar 24, 2022 -  Jim Deibele

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:

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

Downsides? None that I’ve found.