Happy New Year, or whatever's left of it by the time you're reading this. I spent New Year's Eve on my couch with leftover eggnog and a laptop instead of anywhere with actual people, which is either sad or exactly what I wanted depending on the hour you ask me. Anyway. Back to the desk, back to the blog, back to complaining about things on the internet.
The story everyone's chewing on right now is the fiscal cliff deal, the one Congress finally coughed up in the small hours of January 1st after months of pretending they wouldn't. The Senate passed it around 2am, the House followed that evening, and Obama's expected to sign it any day now even though he's still out in Hawaii. Every news site on earth has already told you the headline version: tax rates, the payroll tax holiday expiring, all that. I'm not going to rehash it because you've read it four times already and honestly so have I, out of some masochistic sense of civic duty.
What almost nobody's talking about, and what actually matters if you're the kind of person who reads a blog with "tech" in the name, is buried way down in the bill's text: the R&D tax credit got renewed. Retroactively, back to the start of 2012, and running through the end of 2013. That credit had lapsed at the end of 2011 and every year since it's become this ritual where it gets extended at the absolute last possible second, like Congress enjoys watching accountants sweat. A friend of mine runs a tiny six-person outfit in Austin building sensor firmware, and he texted me at like 1am on the 1st just to say "we get the credit back," which tells you something about how much this matters to actual small companies versus how much airtime it gets. Zero airtime. The tax rate on people making $400k a year got infinitely more column inches than a provision that directly changes whether small engineering shops can afford to keep hiring.
I'm not an accountant and I won't pretend to walk you through the mechanics of it. But if you or someone you know runs a small dev shop or a hardware startup, go actually read what got renewed instead of trusting whatever cable news told you about tax brackets, because that's the part of this bill that touches your world.
Separately, and much pettier: I'm tired of the Apple obituaries. AAPL closed out 2012 around $532, down from north of $700 back in September, and every pundit with a keyboard has spent the last six weeks writing some variation of "is Apple doomed." Maybe. Probably not. Stocks go up, stocks go down, and a company that's still sitting on more cash than most countries isn't exactly circling the drain because Wall Street got spooked. I've owned an iPhone 5 for about three months now and my only real complaint is still the maps app occasionally suggesting I drive through a lake, which, sure, is a genuine problem, but it's not a $170-billion-market-cap kind of problem.
CES kicks off in Las Vegas in less than a week, and the rumor mill's already going full tilt. Word is Samsung's teasing something big for their next flagship, there's a lot of BlackBerry 10 chatter ahead of their end-of-month event, and I fully expect a parade of curved TVs nobody asked for. I'll believe the interesting stuff when it's actually announced instead of speculated about on some forum thread, so I'm not going to pretend I know what's coming. I never go to CES myself, for the record — the one time I got a press badge, back in 2011, I spent four hours in a line for a keynote and left more exhausted than informed. Watching it unfold from a blog with a cup of coffee at a reasonable hour has always seemed like the better deal.
My other New Year's tradition, which I apparently haven't learned from, is promising myself I'll finally set up a proper backup routine for this site. Last year that resolution lasted about eleven days before I got distracted. We'll see how 2013 goes. If techpad vanishes off the internet sometime around January 13th, you'll know exactly why.