Among the various and sundry peripherals you might connect to your new Mac, a modem seems relatively benign. I mean, it’s not as if it represents a new technology, and the only reason you need to buy one these days is because Apple has decreed that we all should have broadband access. And that’s in the same fashion is they decreed we didn’t need floppy drives back in 1998 when the iMac first came out.

The built-in modem’s disappearance isn’t something that was given wide publicity at Apple’s site, but when you see Apple USB Modem among the build-to-order options, prepare to spend that extra $49 if you still have dial-up Internet access or want to fax from your Mac. Regardless of the wisdom of such a decision, I’ve had occasion to work with a couple of these devices in recent days, and, when I read the user comments at Apple’s online store, I found myself wondering what the fuss is all about.

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All the bad news from Microsoft appears to indicate the company has its share of problems. In fact, this has been a perfectly awful week for the house that Bill Gates built.

First there’s the news that the consumer version of Windows Vista will miss its holiday shipping deadline, and won’t be out until 2007. PC box makers are going to have to find something else to sell their products, and don’t be surprised if they take the hit and offer ultra-cheap or free Vista upgrades for folks who buy a new computer for the holidays.

Second, Microsoft reorganizes its Windows unit, and you can bet that’s a strong public statement, regardless of the spin, that things have gone terribly wrong in its operating system arena. It’s also meant to reassure everyone, including Wall Street, that the company will somehow get its act together. Of course, whether anyone believes it is another matter entirely.

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The excuses really aren’t very important, but the end result is. Microsoft has admitted that its long-delayed operating system upgrade, Windows Vista, will miss another deadline, this time the crucial Christmas holiday season; that is, except for volume licensing customers who are far less likely to upgrade. No doubt, PC box makers will be disappointed, because they won’t be able to bank on that half a billion dollars Redmond has budgeted to promote its new release, and they will have to fend for themselves.

To be sure, the promised delivery date, January, is bad for the industry. Assuming it’s met, which is not a given considering the way things have gone so far, it’ll be during a quarter when sales in the industry tend to be at their lowest. Of course that might work to Microsoft’s benefit, because of early release bugs become serious, it’ll give them time to fix them without doing a whole lot of damage.

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In the past, processor emulation has gotten a bad rap for good reasons. Consider Microsoft’s Virtual PC for the Mac, which epitomizes languid performance. But if you think it’s bad, try some of the other PC emulators, even the ones that are loudly proclaimed as Universal binaries fully compatible with MacIntels. Of course, way back in the days when Apple switched to the PowerPC, its emulation performance for older 680×0 software also turned a fast Mac into a slug. In those days, it took years for the software to catch up, and, no, I don’t believe it was a key factor in Apple’s lost market share.

So you would have had modest expectations for Rosetta, the emulation environment that lets you run PowerPC software on an Intel-based Mac. But the firm that supplies at least a portion of the technology, Transitive Corporation, has made far more robust claims, such as performance approaching 70% to 80% of the native processor. However, the reality seems noticeably less, according to most of the folks who have actually benchmarked Rosetta. It’s speed hit is more in the 50% range, give or take a few, and sometimes worse.

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