Duck and cover, kiddies, because there's a fierce debate raging among the Apple community that shows every sign of escalating into a full-blown nuclear riot before the dust finally settles. Despite what you might guess, it has nothing to do with alleged PowerPC 970 benchmarks, whether all the buzz about "Panther piles" is really just one big poop joke, or aluminum vs. titanium and whose dad would win in a fight. No, by far the most heated controversy bubbling right now is this: Just what the heck color is the new iPod's backlight supposed to be, anyway?

For what it's worth, we know we're a smidgen late to this particular party, but from our perspective, it's really only just now starting to get good. It seems that several recent iPod customers got it into their heads that the backlights in the new third-generation units are supposed to be blue-- so when they discovered that they had white backlights just like the rest of us shmoes, they expressed disappointment ranging from "mild" to "volcano heat." We're not entirely sure where the "blue backlight" idea came from, but to be perfectly honest, we thought we had seen that listed as a feature, too, but that must just be the sleep deprivation talking; Apple's posted tech specs clearly state that the new iPods have a "white LED backlight," so we figure we just got confused by the occasional blue-tinted iPod photo floating around. The new iPods have white backlights; case closed.

Or is it? The iPodlounge just kicked the controversy back into high gear, with several eyewitness reports that new new iPods have startlingly different screens and backlights than old new iPods. Meaning, if you were one of the early adopters who snapped up a third-gen 'Pod when they first hit the shelves, you may in fact have screwed yourself out of a higher contrast screen and a backlight that is decidedly-- you guessed it-- bluer than what you've got. If you're obsessive enough that this issue is weighing heavily on your mind, take your old new iPod into an Apple retail store and compare it side-by-side to a new new iPod; even the low-res photo at the iPodlounge reveals a pretty noticeable contrast.

Now, some might argue that with all the unrest in the world today, few things rank as more trivial than whether one's backlight is slightly more or less blue than someone else's-- but those people are usually pretty easy to beat up. Start hoarding firearms and canned goods, because we strongly suspect that the Great Blue-White False Advertising Well Not Really Advertising But Whatever Scandal of 2003 will soon lead to rampaging mobs of irate iPod owners running amok and reducing Western civilization to a smoking pile of rubble. Gee, just imagine what would happen if the backlights were supposed to be purple.