I have the Blackbook. I like the way it looks, so I paid the "black tax." I have found that by using iKlean fairly often, the case still looks great. The track pad is another matter. It is shiny! I wish I had bought the clear plastic overlay for it when it was new. I too am running Office X with Leopard and I do not have any performance issues. I have 2Gb of RAM, but that is a recent upgrade, I ran the standard 1Gb for over a year and I was quite pleased. I know Apple needs an entry level MacBook, but the base model with the Combo Drive is not worth saving $200, the SuperDrive is mandatory for any sort of back up, CDs do not hold nearly enough for backing up.