Two national journalism awards. More than twenty years of bylines.

— the track record

Michael deAgonia on the cover of the 2004 Macworld Conference & Expo Boston brochure
Oh, young Mike…

I started working on Macs in 1993. Back then that meant troubleshooting extensions and making sure Aldus PageMaker picked up that new font. After developing a knack, I never found a good reason to leave.

By 1998 I was in college, working a helpdesk and fixing whatever rolled in. Support and engineering jobs followed after across publishers, newsrooms, and even across the country. I learned the Mac cold, mostly because I had my hands on one every single day.

The writing started in 2003. Computerworld wanted someone who actually used this stuff. The other half of the work ran in parallel the whole time: I rebuild Mac environments and train the people who live in them. I’ve done it over and over — migrating offices from one era of the Mac to the next, tearing down setups that had drifted into a mess and building them back clean, then teaching every tech and end user until it stuck. Different companies, different decades, same job. It’s fun!

These days, it’s a full fleet, architected and built from the ground up to run end to end, using Jamf MDM.

I’ve been working on Macs for a long, long time. My first article was written about why Apple ditching PPC for Intel chipset was a good idea, and I’ve been at this long enough that Macworld Expo put me on the cover of its 2004 Boston brochure. Flash forward a bit and here we are.

None of it was luck except the timing. The platform’s changed a lot since 1993. So have I. What hasn’t changed? The work is still fun.

  • 2008 ASBPE National Digital Award

    Best Original Web Feature, for the co-authored “In Depth: Apple’s Leopard Leaps to New Heights.”

  • 54th Annual Jesse H. Neal Award

    Best Online Article or Series, for the co-written “A Week of Leopard.”

  • Computerworld contributing writer

    A Computerworld byline since 2003: reviews, first looks, and analysis of just about every major Apple release, from the PowerPC days to the Vision Pro. View author page ↗

  • Senior Engineer, Endpoint Systems

    Runs a company’s global Mac platform: deployment and management with Jamf, every yearly macOS upgrade, and the last word when a Mac problem is hard.

Think of this as a portfolio, not a live news feed. Most of it ran from 2007 to 2016, with newer pieces like the Vision Pro review since. But I never left Apple. I just cover it differently now, at the scale of a whole fleet. I’m available for writing and consulting on Apple and consumer tech. If that’s you, let’s talk.

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