They say that you reach your physical and mental peak in your 20s, and you decline slowly but inexorably thereafter. You may extend your lifetime somewhat by eating healthy food, exercising regularly and watching your weight, but you can’t control the influence your genes have on you. There’s only one final end to the great struggle of life.

Of course, a corporation has its own lifecycle that may be far less predictable. Companies expand and contract, and may even end up expanding again, and certainly Apple fits into that category.

Microsoft? Well, some of us believe their best years are behind them and that, if they don’t change their ways, they will, over the long haul, fall extremely far from the mountain top.

On the surface, this would seem to be a damned peculiar suggestion to make. After all, Microsoft continues to earn record profits, and its operating system and office applications are far and away the most used on the planet. At the same time, you can see areas where the bricks are crumbling.

Take the venerable Web browser. Internet Explorer continues to lose market share at the hands of Firefox and, to a lesser degree, Apple’s Safari, which is now also available for Windows and iPhone users. Even offering Internet Explorer 7 as a standard upgrade for Windows XP, and as the default browser on Vista, has done little to slow its inexorable decline.

Apple has certainly made inroads into the Windows world, first by offering improved compatibility, but most important by convincing more and more people to switch to the Mac. As Apple often says during meetings with financial analysts, fully half the people who buy new Macs at an Apple Store are new to the platform and most of them are ditching Windows.

Microsoft’s efforts to lock people into its own media DRM has proven to be a failure. Today it’s all about the iPod, and the iPhone has already seriously encroached into the Windows Mobile market share.

On the hardware front, Microsoft may have shipped a lot of Xboxes, but it may have come, in part, by stuffing the channel and waiting for dealers to move the excess inventory before it catches too much dust. Worse, the Xbox 360 has been plagued with serious hardware defects that forced Microsoft to take a charge of over one billion dollars to repair the things.

When it comes to supporting the emerging high definition DVD standard, Microsoft got in the HD-DVD camp early on, offering such players as an option with the Xbox. But it is widely expected that HD-DVD’s creator, Toshiba, is preparing to throw in the towel and give up its fight against Blu-Ray. So where does that leave Microsoft and its unsold HD-DVD players for its game console?

Not to mention the fact that, between the Xbox and the failed Zune, Microsoft has taken a loss of billions of dollars. They continue to believe that if you toss enough cash at a problem, it’ll solve itself. Compare that to the combined total cost of developing every single version of the iPod, the iPhone, all recent Macs and Mac OS X. Microsoft still spent a whole lot more, and where did that get them?

I will avoid, for the time being, Microsoft’s desperate effort to bear-hug Yahoo and somehow take two losing online ventures and turn them into a smashing success. Even if that were to happen, it would place Microsoft in deep debt for years and the synergies, such as they are, may also take an extremely long time to realize.

All this while disgusted Yahoo employees send their resumes to Google.

But wait, there’s more.

Consider that petition, with over 75,000 signatures, from Windows users begging Microsoft to continue to sell XP past its June deadline this year. Also consider that Windows Vista is widely regarded as a huge failure, even though tens of millions of PCs with the new OS installed continue to sell on the retail and corporate markets. And don’t forget the fact that an untold number of those PCs are being downgraded to XP as soon as they’re taken out of their shipping cartons.

Then there’s Microsoft’s alleged clout with PC makers. It didn’t stop Dell, for example, from offering several models with Linux preloaded. That has to be one huge disappointment, even though Microsoft probably still gets a check from Dell for a Windows OEM license on those computers. It’s the perception and not the reality that counts here.

In the end, all it may take is new leadership at the helm of Microsoft to save the ship before it sinks. But, regardless of how it all plays out, things will never be the same.

That tired cliché states that little things mean a lot and when Apple removed the word “Computer” from the corporate name, many people understandably believed that Macs were going to be set on the backburner, letting them fend for itself, more or less.

Certainly you had to believe the critics when Apple failed to give the Mac much play at the 2007 Macworld Expo, at least during the Steve Jobs keynote. Certainly the products were well in evidence over at their display booths. But no new models appeared.

Surely something is going on here, and it can’t be good, or at least that’s what some of you no doubt thought at the time.

Through much of 2007, Mac upgrades were incremental, to take advantage of new processors. Only the fall introduction of an updated iMac with a spiffy, aluminum case reminiscent of the Apple displays revealed any Mac focus on the part of the company’s crack design teams.

So what happened next? Well, iPod unit sales were relatively flat in the final quarter of the year in terms of unit sales, but Macs starred big time, recording over 2.3 million unit sales, which was a company record. Yes, more and more people bought MacBooks and MacBook Pros, but the star of the show was, you guessed it, the iMac!

Story continued in this week’s Tech Night Owl Newsletter.

Apple has always had a love and hate relationship with its customers. In the old days, when you called support, you sometimes got a downright hostile attitude, and getting a solution to your problem wasn’t very easy, and sometimes doomed to failure.

In those days, I avoided calling Apple at all custs.

At the time, Apple also offered a pathetic 90-day warranty. Today, products are all guaranteed for a year, except for 90 days of free phone support. AppleCare extends that to three years for Macs, two years for iPods and iPhones.

This isn’t to say that Apple’s tech support is perfect. Although they get high marks in Consumer Reports — no friend to Macs by the way — and elsewhere, nothing is perfect. I’ve occasionally run into delays and difficulties getting a problem resolved, but I usually succeed in the end without having to drop my name into the appropriate departments at One Infinite Loop.

Indeed, it does seem to me that Apple wants to take care of its customers, simply because it’s good business and they’re here to make a profit. But that raises the eternal question of Time Machine and why you can’t backup via a wireless connection. This was a feature promised for Leopard, but dropped from the feature-set before 10.5 came out.

Why did this happen? Well, it may just be that Apple simply couldn’t get he feature to work reliability. After all, you don’t want a backup with corrupted data. That may be worse than having no backup at all, especially if you try to restore your files in part or an entire drive.

So that died down, until Steve Jobs introduced Time Capsule last month. On the surface, Time Capsule is simply an AirPort Extreme married to a backup drive. Jobs said the drive was a “server level” mechanism, and I won’t dispute the contention. When it’s out, you’ll read performance results to see how it fares, but the key with a backup is longevity. Will you be able to get years of reliable performance before the mechanism gives up the ghost?

The real furor arose over the fact that Time Capsule can backup wirelessly, so just what is going on here? Did Apple plan all along to keep this feature from us unless we bought another product from them? What about existing AirPort Extremes and the USB drives we can connect to them? Is there ever going to be a fix?

Came the 10.5.2 update, and nothing was mentioned about offering the ability of Time Machine to function on wireless connections. A few people tested backups, just to see if this was perhaps an unannounced “feature,” and it still doesn’t work.

Time Capsule is still on the agenda for a February delivery. If you go to The Apple Store to place your order, that’s all the illumination you get, as we conclude the first half of the month.

So what about existing hardware? Is it all about Time Capsule and the plot to get you to pay more money? I don’t think so, and we shouldn’t go overboard because 10.5.2 didn’t contain the fix. Maybe it requires a firmware change in AirPort Extreme, and that will arrive when Time Capsule leaves the shipping plant.

But maybe, just maybe, there’s something in the AirPort Extreme’s design that prevents wireless backups via Time Machine from working reliably. Perhaps Time Capsule includes a redesigned Wi-Fi router that does support the feature, and there’s no way to retrofit that capability into legacy products.

Or maybe not.

It may very well be that the reason Time Capsule isn’t shipping yet is because that feature still won’t function, and Apple has every intention of offering it as an update so all of you can benefit too. To be perfectly honest, I don’t know, but I do believe that, in the end, Apple usually tries to do the right thing, and if it can’t happen, they’ll have a good explanation.

So before you sign those petitions and/or call your lawyers about class-action suits, please be patient. Remember that Apple did fix most of the problems with Leopard’s translucent menus, the menu bar and Stacks in 10.5.2. You complained, and they listened.

Let’s cut them a little slack, at least for now. If Time Capsule ships and nothing is done to add wireless Time Machine backups to other models in the AirPort Extreme line, then it will make sense to complain with appropriate fervor.

From the first day that Leopard arrived on the scene, the online universe has been filled with problem reports. On the surface, this is understandable. When you have millions of people using a brand new computer operating system, a small percentage will encounter difficulties of one sort or another.

Now you can place the blame for those difficulties at the feet of many offenders. Sure, it may all be Apple’s fault, and that’s the easiest answer, since it’s their product. At the same time, the source of your troubles may be due to a problem with your Mac hardware, and again it’s Apple’s problem, assuming that you haven’t abused your computer in some fashion. And certainly dropping your note-book to the hard wood or tile floor counts as abuse, although I presume such situations are usually accidental.

But there are other issues that arise, such as the new printer or other peripheral that doesn’t have Leopard-compatible drivers. True, Apple provides an almost exhausting number of printer drivers in Leopard, and even the tools for companies to use Apple’s Software Update feature to deliver newer versions. However, a fair number of products may not function, or function in a crippled fashion. Here, the blame probably lies with the manufacturer, and not with Apple. They might, of course, blame Apple for a last-minute change that broke their product, but there’s nothing you can really do to confirm whether that statement is true or not.

The other issue comes closer to home. You want your Mac tailored specifically to your needs, naturally, and that may include installing some third-party hacks that mess with the interface or add some features you really believe Apple should have included all by themselves. Unfortunately, some of those “toys” aren’t compatible with Leopard, or break during the upgrade process. So suddenly things are unstable.

Now if you look at the various fixes in the 10.5.1 and 10.5.2 updates, you’d come away convinced that there isn’t an awful lot Apple failed to address. It’s quite an all-inclusive list, and, while you may not like that 3D Dock on the bottom of your screen, that’s easily changed via a simple Terminal hack or third-party system alteration tool. Oh yes, didn’t I tell you to be careful of those things in the previous paragraph?

But at the end of the day, after looking at the various Mac troubleshooting sites, I come away with the feeling that Apple needs to get a 10.5.3 out there post haste. Or even sooner.

Now what could possibly be wrong? Well, take Wi-Fi. Apple has staked an awful lot on a reliable wireless connection among your various Apple products, from iPhone, to Apple TV and to your Macs. As most of you know, Apple was perhaps the first company some years back to take the then-fledgling Wi-Fi standards and make a huge push to get AirPort into the hands of as many Mac users as possible. It was among the first to embrace newest standards, including the still-draft 802.11n protocol.

However, Wi-Fi remains a sore spot. Frankly, I don’t have very much trouble. No, it’s not trouble-free by any means. There are tons and tons of complaints about dropped connections, somewhat reminiscent of the dropped call problem with your wireless phone.

So what can I say?

Now I live in a somewhat-cluttered neighborhood, where there are tons of wireless routers in operation at any one time. My master bedroom is about 50 feet from the office/studio area, and that ought to be well within the range of any Wi-Fi connection, right? Well, not quite. You see, I have occasionally gotten erratic connections in the bedroom. This is not just with a PowerBook or MacBook and an AirPort Extreme, but with routers from other companies too, such as Buffalo Technology and Linksys.

If anything, the 10.5.2 update has made my connections more stable. From here, I suspect that my ultimate solution is just to put a second router in the bedroom and have it set in bridge mode, so it passes on a more powerful signal.

Whether or not there’s anything Apple could do to make things better, I don’t know. Certainly if your Wi-Fi connection worked all right in Tiger, and in previous versions of Leopard, surely something is broken that has to be fixed. I’ll assume, for the sake of argument, that it’s Apple’s fault and that they have a lot more work to do.

However, before you say that Leopard is a disaster, it still has an extremely high approval rating. More to the point, they said even worse things about Tiger. Or don’t you remember?