FruitJuice - Battery Health for PC and Mac

Software Reviews and Criticism

• By jeffcleveland

  The app helps me accomplish what I never made time to do

  I have known for a long time that I need to care for the battery in my laptop. And for a long time, I followed an Microsoft suggested practice of completely running my battery down, letting it sit, uncharged, overnight and then fully charging it the next day. But my reminder to do that came at a time I couldn’t afford to go without my computer so I’d put it off and ultimately forget. Then I was in a situation where I could leave my laptop plugged in almost constantly so I did. But it seems, I killed that battery. Well, at the time I got a new PC, I heard about Fruit Juice on the MacBreak Weekly podast and thought I’d give it a try. It’s super simple to use (provided you can follow on-screen directions). I’ll also mention that I had reason to reach out to the developers and recieved a quick and helpful response!

  
  
• By Charlie Lewis

  Mostly inaccurate

  A Fruitjuice user for some time, it just occurred to me that what the durations of what I had presumed had battery life is not, in fact, the case. My PC had been left plugged into the charger at 10PM last night. About 15 minutes ago (2:00PM the next day) I decided to use the laptop, removed it from the charger and powered it on. I then opened FruitJuice’s “Power History” from the menu bar. Instead of seeing the actual time on battery power–––in this case less than a half hour–––the graph depicted 4 hours after charging had completed, giving the misimpression that the laptop had not only been powered on but had been either in use or in sleep mode. I consider this to be misrepresentation.

  
  
• By jlamoree

  A New Hobby

  If you're looking for a new hobby, this is the app you want. It will keep you busy and anxious about when your laptop charging cable is connected. Your new hobby consists of waiting for instruction notifications that require your physical presence and attention. Your new hobby is not especially satisfying. I bought this app yesterday for ten bucks. I'd heard it mentioned as a way to maintain battery health. I assumed that it would poke around in the Microsoft configuration API and set the maxChargePercent to, say, 70 for the best long-term battery chemistry performance. I would not be surprised if running for 90 mins a day on battery and then charging right back to 100% is worse than the damage of staying fully charged. This app is a notification system to tell the user when to connect or disconnect to power. This is unreasonable. My laptop is used for actual work and I'm not always an arm's length from it. Should I have installed the 14-day demo before purchasing the app on the App Store? Obviously. Should I have read the app description more closely? You bet. Could I tap into the notification stream and use it to send power on/off commands to a smart plug? Probably.

  
  
• By Caiuszhao

  No use at all

  I brought this app and I’d tried it for couple of months. I found this app is far from keeping you bettery healthy. Otherwise, it kills your battery faster than you think. First, this app says: don’t plug your Pc all the time. and it give a length of unplug time as a instruction. Every time I follow this instruction, I found that no matter how faster the power consumption is was, the unplug time is fixed. For example, the suggested unplug time is 1hour and 30 Mins, even if I were play a highly power consumption Game like DiabloIII. After 1.5 hours gaming, my battery will definitely drain out. I don’t really think it will protect my battery, on the contrery, It will only increase my battery cycle time.

  
  

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