If your iPod is more than 2 years old and breaks, do you send your iPod for repair or just throw it away and buy a new one.

Apple usually want to charge you almost as much as a new iPod to do the simplest repair. This even includes replacing the battery. This is either because, being a large organisation, it apparently can’t do your iPod repair any cheaper because it has thousands of staff to support, or it sees it as a good revenue stream.

The other point of view on this however, is that being the manufacturer, they want to sell you a new iPod, not repair your old one. This keeps their iPod production facility busy and makes lots of profit. It’s in their interest to take your old iPod out of circulation rather than to repair it.

But it’s in your interest to get your iPod repaired, here’s why:

1. Money! Plain and simple, you can usually get an iPod repair made for less than £40 for most common repairs. That’s a fraction of the cost of a new iPod.

2. The environment. Your iPod may only be small, but if hundreds of thousands of iPods break down every year (which they do), then that’s a lot of landfill full of broken iPods.

3. Contamination. All iPods (as well as other rechargeable electronic devices) contain Lithium Ion batteries. These are full of harmful chemicals which leach into out water supply over time if we just bury them in the ground. They need to be carefully recycled and disposed of on a safe fashion.

4. Time. It’s quicker to send your iPod to an iPod repair company than to send it back to Apple. Average turnround is 3 days for an iPod repair company, weeks if it goes to Apple.

5. Unemployment. There’s a whole industry grown up around iPod repair and iPod parts. If everyone suddenly stopped repairing their iPods and bought a brand new one each time, thousands of people who earn their living doing iPod repair would be out of work.

So, do the right thing, save yourself a bundle, and do your bit for the environment too. Get your iPod repaired and don’t buy a new one unless you need to.