If the reviewers of the Macbook Air are right, then people don't really care about Apple design.

Above is a commercial for an original Pentium, it promises movie quality films, amazing computer graphics and instant number crunching.

A Pentium had around 3 million transistors, 2 year old Intel processors today have 1.7 billion.

You would need six hundred Pentium based computers, in an office the size of a hangar, to equal the processing power of a single Macbook Air that fits in an envelope.

Yet if you would believe what you read, the Macbook Air, is under spec'ed, when the vast majority of professional computer users use exactly the same software as we did when we had Pentiums.

And this opinion, that the Air is under powered, is according to the leading technology journalists in the country, not mad people with tin foil hats.

Pentium's were first made when the applications that people most used were spreadsheets, word processors and presentation software. A tiny minority pf people did things like 3d graphics and high resolution photo retouching.

In fact the most notable new entrant in software, the browser, would potentially reduce client computer requirements.

Today not much has changed, more people do photo retouching but often at lower resolution. More processing is done on servers, and most people still use things like word processors and spreadsheets in similar ways.

In fact the extra demands on computing power are largely for consumer applications, so you could argue that 'professional' computers need something else than computing horse power.

The initial reception of the Macbook Air proves that the current process of designing, marketing and selling computers has nothing to do with 'specification' requirements, but everything to do with specification lust.

If the critics are right, they show that above all that despite Apple's great designs, people don't really care about design, unless its lathered on top of tech prowess.

But what if the problem was with the critics themselves. Perhaps they are out of touch and way too geeky for a world where computers are not sold like self assembly amateur electronics projects.