This little question is the third rail of technology journalism. No other aspect of personal computing attracts so much emotion, or lands so much hate-mail in journalists' in boxes accusing them of bias. To make my own background clear: I've got a Mac on my desk at home and a PC on my desk at work. I swear at both. If it means anything, I've gotten a little more hate-mail from Apple advocates than PC partisans.</br></br>But apart from those true believers, there are people who would just like to know which platform will be a better fit for their own purposes. There's no right answer, but here are a few things to ponder:</br></br>Cost: At the entry level, there's no longer a big difference between the prices of Macs and PCs. The cheapest PC-and-monitor combo with 64 megabytes of memory (a realistic minimum) at Best Buy's site costs $580 after a rebate. The cheapest iMac system available costs $800. That $220 isn't pocket change, but it's not a huge gap, either.</br></br>Apple stays roughly competitive with its rivals throughout the iMac line. But between $1,500 and $2,000, Apple has nothing to compete with Windows machines. If you're looking for a computer with some open expansion slots and a 17-inch monitor, a desktop PC will be awfully cheap compared to a Power Mac G4.</br></br>Reliability: Both operating systems crash. A lot. Yes, it's possible to fine-tune either system to a remarkable degree of stability, but most users have neither the time nor the aptitude for that kind of tweaking. (I'm not addressing Microsoft's more reliable, more expensive and more resource-intensive Windows 2000, which is designed for business use.)