New Mac / Apple durability (Mac Mini)

I joined the forum three years ago when I bought my G4 iBook. It has been shut down about three or four times since then- it is truly, in my mind, a benchmark for durability.

We obtained an Intel Macbook from our son- the harddrive crashed after it behaved erratically prior (this is one of the first Intel Macbooks). I've yet to repair it- but I'm going to for the sake thereof... it felt like a letdown after what I've experienced with the PowerPC iBook (upon which I'm typing right now!)

...but here is the concern:

I'm about to drop the hammer on the basic new Mac Mini for my wife's graduate school and kids' web surfing. Are the new Macs as durable? It seems this forum has become rife with horror stories- and I'm a bit nervous about it.

I've got an older Core Duo Mini, it's a little desktop, not to be thrown around like a laptop mind you the internals are laptopish down to the HD and RAM used inside it. But it's got yet to let me down sitting on my desk under an LCD screen....the only real weak point I can see with it is the slot loading drive if say a really young child was to try and jam something in there. Other than that observation, Iwould say go for it and don't do what I did, get a combo drive....shooting myself for that ! Wish I got the SuperDrive model.