This blog was written by Mike Afford.  Read more of Mike’s blogs here.

Like most of Western Europe, here in Ireland we had a crazy spell of cold weather over Christmas and the New Year. All very festive for sure – for a couple of days anyway.

But I wasn’t laughing a few weeks later when the thaw came, the pipes burst, and our kitchen ceiling collapsed under the weight of water. There on the worktop, right underneath the gaping hole in the ceiling was my Macbook Pro laptop. It’s a 15 inch version (3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB memory) – none of which is much use with a torrent of steaming water and great lumps of ceiling on top of it.

Anyway, it survived (all hail the laptop bag!). But it was a lucky escape all the same. It got me thinking about all the things I like (and the things I’d miss) if my Macbook Pro hadn’t pulled through. These won’t necessarily be everyone’s favorites – just some things that raise a little smile for me.

1. Magnetic power connector.

This was the first thing I noticed when I got the machine last year. Such a neat little idea to have the power lead snap into place with a magnet. There’s just enough strength to keep it secure under normal circumstances, but to release itself easily if you snag the cable or just want to unplug the thing. The ‘MagSafe’ connector also has a little LED to let you know when the battery’s charged, or charging. Nice.

2. Speed.

It’s inevitable that newer machines will be fast, but I’m still impressed that the new laptop can out-perform either of my G5s while being physically a fraction of the size. Last year I completed the graphics for a 30-part series for BBC Two. I set up the master After Effects projects and prepared the base artwork on one of the G5s in my studio, using a Wacom tablet and Cinema HD display. But it turned out to be more efficient to do the modifications for each episode and all the rendering on the laptop. So in the end, the majority of the TV graphics were actually produced every evening from the comfort of my front room with the added bonus of a glass of wine and a real fire crackling away in the background.

3. Faults are sometimes features.

Talking of crackling fires – a few times I’d noticed that the screen seemed to be gently pulsating (just a barely noticible change in brightness now and then). I did a quick Google search for ‘Macbook pro screen flickering’ and my heart sank when I saw that other people were having the same (or similar) issues. Anyway, I decided to look at the System Preferences to see if there was a screen setting that might fix it. Sure enough under ‘Displays’ was a checkbox for ‘Automatically adjust brightness as ambient light changes’. So basically all the Mac was doing was trying to compensate for the light from a real fire flickering away behind me.

4. Silence.

The MacBook pro is SO quiet! At least it is now. Up until a few days ago, the hard drive had been making the (very) occasional strange chirping sound. I wondered whether it was the side-effects of its near soaking from the burst pipe. But it turned out that it is a known issue with 7200-rpm drives that shipped with the June 2009 MacBook Pro. There is a Firmware Update for this at http://support.apple.com/downloads/Hard_Drive_Firmware_Update_2_0 (remember to back up first!).

5. Battery life.

I’ll admit I haven’t really checked to see if I’m actually getting the 7 hours per charge claimed for the 15″ MacBook Pro – it’s hard to tell when you’re working on graphics-heavy projects some days and just noodling about on others. I tend to charge the laptop overnight and very, very rarely run out of battery life during the day. Maybe that says more about how many hours a day I actually work (!), but even so, the battery life is noticeably long.

6. Multi-touch trackpad.

I’d already got out of the habit of using a mouse (both the G5’s have tablet and pens) – but now I’m finding that using the trackpad on the Macbook is just second nature now. Scrolling down a page isn’t an inconvenience any more with a simple two-finger swipe instead. Interestingly enough, this is probably unexpected behavior on ‘long’ web pages that use anchor text and ID’s to jump to various sections on the same page – I’m already finding that it’s easier to scroll than to click the link.

7. Adobe CS4 Master Collection.

OK, it’s software, but where would I be without CS4, and CS3 before it? Somehow Apple and Adobe seem like such a perfect match (it’s just a shame they can’t agree about Flash!).

8. iChat.

This one’s on my list just because of the look on my little 2-year-old boy’s face when he sees his uncle and auntie saying hello from London!

9. Parallels Desktop.

Software again, and I know it must be pretty obvious by now that I’m a big fan of the Mac. But having the ability to fire up one or more operating systems alongside Mac OS X is sometimes almost too good to be true. Mostly I use Parallels to check cross-browser compatibility for my own website designs. In the past I’ve used sites like browsershots.org, but what could be nicer than having an actual Windows machine (or three, or more) sitting there on your Mac desktop. I tend to run Firefox and Safari directly from the Mac, and then try IE6, IE7 and IE8 in three Parallels windows all under Windows XP. At some point I’ll get round to Chrome and Opera, but just being able to see what the various Internet Explorer versions look like, without having to move out of my seat, is SUCH a bonus! I’ll admit it, I do also get a little kick out of seeing a Windows desktop without an actual PC attached to it, and hearing the Windows start-up jingle coming out of a Macbook Pro. This isn’t something that looks and acts a bit like Windows, it’s the real thing.

10. It is BEAUTIFUL.

And it looks even better without a kitchen ceiling on top of it.