If you are concerned about your privacy and security online, using a VPN could give you some reassurance. Apple provides various measures in macOS that make Macs more secure, but if you want to ensure that the connection between your Mac and the internet is protected, rather than the computer itself, you need a VPN.
Using a VPN essentially makes you invisible on the web – your data is encrypted, your IP address is hidden, and you can even make it look like you are surfing from another country. This latter reason is the key motive many people using a VPN have: they want to access services that are locked to a particular region, such as accessing US Netflix from the UK.
While accessing locked content is a bit of a grey area, due to licensing agreements, we don’t blame anyone who is desperate to watch the latest season of their favourite program when it airs in the US rather than waiting for it to come to the UK. Paying to watch a streaming service that’s not available in your country has to be less morally wrong than actual piracy.
Our top choice right now is NordVPN, which we feel stands out in many areas, from speed and privacy to unblocking and ease of use.
HOW WE TESTED VPNS
For each VPN service we review, we conduct tests at three different times of the day: morning, afternoon, and evening, using Ookla Speedtest (fave.co/3lZO84I). We start by measuring the speed of our unprotected Internet connection before testing the upload/download speeds of the VPN service. These tests are conducted to servers located in North America, the UK, Europe, Oceana and Asia over an Ethernet connection with a service provision of 100Mb/s.
To test upload and download speeds, we close down all background Internet processes on the Mac, using TripMode. The only traffic on the system able to upload or download any data is Ookla. We use this set-up to ensure that the numbers that Ookla produced were not stymied by anything else that the computer may have been doing at the time. The speeds Ookla captured were then averaged, providing us with a final numeric score.
We then use those scores to calculate a percentage of difference in speeds, which is what you’ll see in our reviews. Since Internet speeds change constantly based on server load, how fast your connection is, and a gazillion other factors, we feel this provides a better picture of what you can expect from a service, on the whole, than merely quoting
