It is a DNS server that makes every ad and tracking domain route to nothing. It speeds everything up and uses an almost undetectable amount of resources. It could be done in the router with different software I'm guessing, but I use tomato firmware which isn't great for huge DNS block lists.
I mean, yes, I know what Pi-Hole does. I just fail to see why it's better than a hosts list on your computer, for example: that works wherever you are and you don't need fancy software for it. Plus it's "infinitely worse" than a normal adblocker when browsing the internet.
> "It works for your entire network (everyone in your household)"
I guess whether this is the killer feature or makes it suck depends on whether you've got a lot of devices and family members in your household that you can now easily protect with a single solution, or you're a single person with a laptop that spends half the time (or more) outside your home.
It's fantastic for the first group, useless for the second.
Ad blockers and Pi Hole each have pros/cons, but using them together gives you the best of both worlds (with the only downside being the overhead of running an adblocking extension or overhead of managing/updating a hosts file block list)
You can block ads in Safari or apps using SFSafariViewController by installing a content blocker. You can use a VPN-based blocker to perform DNS blocking on-device.
Not much of what you said is actually true. Having it on your local network allows any wireless device to have a huge amounts of ads and trackers blocked automatically. Some sites were unusable on phones before and now they load fast and are readable.
Then there are things like 'smart' tvs sending data back, apps sending all sorts of data out etc. It is quite a game changer.
Also you can do both, but dns blocking for the whole network is always on for everything once you set it up.
