5 ms·

Yet another wrong use of the word bricked. Bricked means bricked and you can’t ever come back from that.

iamnotacrook 7y ago
No, it's not as simple as that. People use brick to mean slightly different things - sometimes they say hard/soft bricked instead of bricked. And you'll even find some people who say what you say but admit that it was still the correct word to describe devices which can only be fixed by disassembling the hardware and using jtag, which "brick extremists" probably wouldn't allow.
- JustSomeNobody 7y ago
  This was a boot loop condition. The person reporting it clearly knows this and yet confused the issue by saying "bricked." Bricked is non-recoverable.
  - lagadu 7y ago
    Can you provide your definition of non-recoverable? An extreme example: someone could tear down the phone down to every single last nanometer-scale transistor and polymer, fix the problem and reassemble it; that would make it recoverable from even most scenarios of destruction, hell, with enough energy available one could in theory fuse/fusion it down into iron and reconstruct the very elements themselves in order to eventually produce a working phone again. There are some implicit limits to what "bricked" means and those limits vary by individual.
    - JustSomeNobody 7y ago
      I'm curious, what component could you replace in this instance to recover the iPhone and not lose data? One could argue that every single component on a device could be replaced to bring it back from the dead, but I would argue it isn't the same device at that point. Bricked is a term that is, and always has been, defined as hardware that is rendered useless by bad software. Replacing hardware components to get a device working is not un-bricking it.
      - iamnotacrook 7y ago
        "One could argue that every single component on a device could be replaced to bring it back from the dead, but I would argue it isn't the same device at that point." This is entering the realms of philosophy. If you get your screen replaced is it any longer your phone? If someone replaced every part of your phone one piece at a time, at teh pace of one piece a week did they suddenly steal it the moment the last piece was switched out? After all, they have "your" phone - if the concept of "your" phone ever made any sense in the first place. Rendering useless by bad software - so if you take my linux device and install windows I now have something with objectively worse software than before, and where all my software no longer runs, and which is incapable of reading my ext4 formatting external hard drive. So...you've bricked it?
        JustSomeNobody 7y ago
        > Rendering useless by bad software - so if you take my linux device and install windows I now have something with objectively worse software than before, and where all my software no longer runs, and which is incapable of reading my ext4 formatting external hard drive. So...you've bricked it? Obviously not because you can always put Linux back on it. A bricked device, you have no way of doing this. It's useless. I can't believe all of this discussion simply because people want reuse a word that already means something. It's like the FE devs hijacking "real time". Good grief already.
Someone1234 7y ago
This definition never holds up to scrutiny. For example, if I pull out my EPROM writer, de-solder the chips, and update them almost no device is truly "bricked" by this definition. The only exceptions would be burned update fuses or similar physical damage. Making the definition itself extremely niche, to the point of being synonymous with "physically damaged/destroyed." I myself stick to the broader "technologically as useful as a brick" definition. Which a boot-looping iPhone absolutely fits. The fact there are ways to recover it is neither here nor there. I generally call what you're describing a "Hard Brick." But even those are sometimes recoverable via as I said chip re-programming.
- JustSomeNobody 7y ago
  I stand by words mean things. If you can recover in any way, it's not a brick. In this case it is a boot loop and there's no reason they should not have used boot loop to describe the condition.
  - SkyBelow 7y ago
    >If you can recover in any way Physically replacing every single component, one by one, will lead to a recovery. >I stand by words mean things. They are an abstraction of thought to enable communication and external storage. A very leaky abstraction.
    - Zenbit_UX 7y ago
      A bricked device can be recovered - usually - by replacing hardware, that's the limit of the definition. The GP comment is right, bricked is bricked and there's no way to recover a bricked device with any software means. It means the hardware is fucked and it's usefulness is equivalent to a brick.
      - lagadu 7y ago
        What if you can reprogram an eeprom to make it work, would you consider it bricked? You're not replacing any hardware and are fixing only software. At the end of the day language is (for all pragmatic purposes) finite but possible states of the universe are not, so you can't have a perfect definition of that catches all possible states you want while excluding all others with perfect accuracy.
m463 7y ago
I can't help but imagine what would happen if you take a phone stuck like this to the apple store. Would they save your phone or tell you to reinstall?

No, it's not as simple as that. People use brick to mean slightly different things - sometimes they say hard/soft bricked instead of bricked. And you'll even find some people who say what you say but admit that it was still the correct word to describe devices which can only be fixed by disassembling the hardware and using jtag, which "brick extremists" probably wouldn't allow.

JustSomeNobody 7y ago
This was a boot loop condition. The person reporting it clearly knows this and yet confused the issue by saying "bricked." Bricked is non-recoverable.
- lagadu 7y ago
  Can you provide your definition of non-recoverable? An extreme example: someone could tear down the phone down to every single last nanometer-scale transistor and polymer, fix the problem and reassemble it; that would make it recoverable from even most scenarios of destruction, hell, with enough energy available one could in theory fuse/fusion it down into iron and reconstruct the very elements themselves in order to eventually produce a working phone again. There are some implicit limits to what "bricked" means and those limits vary by individual.
  - JustSomeNobody 7y ago
    I'm curious, what component could you replace in this instance to recover the iPhone and not lose data? One could argue that every single component on a device could be replaced to bring it back from the dead, but I would argue it isn't the same device at that point. Bricked is a term that is, and always has been, defined as hardware that is rendered useless by bad software. Replacing hardware components to get a device working is not un-bricking it.
    - iamnotacrook 7y ago
      "One could argue that every single component on a device could be replaced to bring it back from the dead, but I would argue it isn't the same device at that point." This is entering the realms of philosophy. If you get your screen replaced is it any longer your phone? If someone replaced every part of your phone one piece at a time, at teh pace of one piece a week did they suddenly steal it the moment the last piece was switched out? After all, they have "your" phone - if the concept of "your" phone ever made any sense in the first place. Rendering useless by bad software - so if you take my linux device and install windows I now have something with objectively worse software than before, and where all my software no longer runs, and which is incapable of reading my ext4 formatting external hard drive. So...you've bricked it?
      - JustSomeNobody 7y ago
        > Rendering useless by bad software - so if you take my linux device and install windows I now have something with objectively worse software than before, and where all my software no longer runs, and which is incapable of reading my ext4 formatting external hard drive. So...you've bricked it? Obviously not because you can always put Linux back on it. A bricked device, you have no way of doing this. It's useless. I can't believe all of this discussion simply because people want reuse a word that already means something. It's like the FE devs hijacking "real time". Good grief already.

Someone1234 7y ago

This definition never holds up to scrutiny. For example, if I pull out my EPROM writer, de-solder the chips, and update them almost no device is truly "bricked" by this definition. The only exceptions would be burned update fuses or similar physical damage. Making the definition itself extremely niche, to the point of being synonymous with "physically damaged/destroyed." I myself stick to the broader "technologically as useful as a brick" definition. Which a boot-looping iPhone absolutely fits. The fact there are ways to recover it is neither here nor there. I generally call what you're describing a "Hard Brick." But even those are sometimes recoverable via as I said chip re-programming.

JustSomeNobody 7y ago
I stand by words mean things. If you can recover in any way, it's not a brick. In this case it is a boot loop and there's no reason they should not have used boot loop to describe the condition.
- SkyBelow 7y ago
  >If you can recover in any way Physically replacing every single component, one by one, will lead to a recovery. >I stand by words mean things. They are an abstraction of thought to enable communication and external storage. A very leaky abstraction.
  - Zenbit_UX 7y ago
    A bricked device can be recovered - usually - by replacing hardware, that's the limit of the definition. The GP comment is right, bricked is bricked and there's no way to recover a bricked device with any software means. It means the hardware is fucked and it's usefulness is equivalent to a brick.
    - lagadu 7y ago
      What if you can reprogram an eeprom to make it work, would you consider it bricked? You're not replacing any hardware and are fixing only software. At the end of the day language is (for all pragmatic purposes) finite but possible states of the universe are not, so you can't have a perfect definition of that catches all possible states you want while excluding all others with perfect accuracy.

m463 7y ago

I can't help but imagine what would happen if you take a phone stuck like this to the apple store. Would they save your phone or tell you to reinstall?