Should I just return my broken iPod back to Apple?

Bringing your iPod back to Apple to fix sounds great for a number of reasons. Noticed I said "sounds great."

The truth is, as I see it, for about 90% of the cases when something goes wrong with an iPod, there's no reason to return it other than the fact that you're too lazy to do it yourself. However, this is if:

1) You have your iPod still under warranty or have a protection plan. Obviously this helps, however:

2) It'll cost you. Essentially you'll be paying someone for something that you could have done in ten minutes, for a tenth of the price. There's plenty of horror stories about Applecare, among these are some people's very likely concern that you won't even have the same iPod sent back to you that you sent in to be fixed!

Like I said, if you've got patience, time and (very little) money, you can be fixing your iPod or anyone's iPod in no time at all.