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English is not my native language and this is the first time I hear about this “bricked” expression. What does it mean?
by bromuro 7y ago
English is not my native language and this is the first time I hear about this “bricked” expression. What does it mean?
- DonaldPShimoda 7y agoIt means you've rendered your device functionally equivalent to a brick, i.e., it's a hunk of inanimate metal that will never again be useful.
- dagmx 7y agoIt means that something made your device non functional, so it’s almost like your device is a brick or useless heavy load
- plussed_reader 7y agoSome manner of update or action attenuates the processing power of the device to that of a clay brick.
- throwaway15392 7y agoIt’s not a real word, it’s more of a slang word It just changes the noun brick into a verb. So if a laptop has bricked, it means it’s like a brick now (useless)
- eru 7y agoSlang words are real. (And so is "ain't", and most words you can make up on the spot.)
- throwaway15392 7y agoWell duh. But that’s not the way I mean by real which everyone can understand, so you’re just being pedantic and annoying
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- __init 7y agoOriginally, "the device is bricked" meant that the device was about as useful as a brick, i.e. it had no useful functionality left couldn't be recovered at all. However, as the parent points out, it's been increasingly misused.
- copperx 7y agoI wonder what the replacement term will be. Probably "hard bricked"?
- K0SM0S 7y agoHard / soft bricked is already conventional for phones and consoles (most mainstream products, unsurprisingly). I kinda like "cold bricked" personally. - soft: need some sysadmin mojo, USB adb etc. - hard: can be fixed with soldering, physical repair of sorts. - cold: will never again work even if you're Louis Rossman (maybe as a ship of theseus). Think CPU fried.
- brippalcharrid 7y agoRendered permanently inert, given the computational utility of a rectangular block of baked clay; banjaxed.
- bitwize 7y agoTo render a device completely inoperable, turning your computer into an expensive brick.
- copperx 7y agoI remember it was originally used for smartphones, which makes sense because of their size is comparable to an actual brick.
- DonHopkins 7y agoWhen computers were bigger heavier and not the size of cell phones, you could say "door stopped". https://www.techopedia.com/definition/18959/doorstop https://www.techopedia.com/definition/18959/doorstop But you can't keep a door opened with a broken cell phone, so they had to invent a new mobile-friendly term "bricked". For a mainframe or minicomputer, you could say "monolithed" or "bouldered".
- bazzargh 7y agoIt predates smartphones by at least a decade, maybe several decades. https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/488450/etymology-bricked-to-render-an-electronic-device-inoperable https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/488450/etymology...
- kbumsik 7y agoFYI, Korean have literally the same expression used in the web "벽돌이 되다", not sure if it comes from the english web though. Anyway, the "bricked" expression is more commonly used in smartphones and PlayStation Portable (PSP) than laptops. Then it makes more sense when considering the size of the devices.
- saghm 7y ago> Anyway, the "bricked" expression is more commonly used in smartphones and PlayStation Portable (PSP) than laptops. Then it makes more sense when considering the size of the devices. I think it's also at least in part more commonly applied to those types of devices because they're generally more locked down than a laptop, leading users to risk bricking by trying jailbreaking them. Installing a custom OS on most laptops just isn't nearly as risky in terms of bricking potential.
- kbumsik 7y agoRight, I mentioned PSP because jailbreaking was specifically widespread for PSP.
- randrews 7y agoWhat everyone else said, but also, it's a particular kind of turned-into-a-brick: you can render something useless just by running a few hundred volts through it; "bricked" means that it's still functioning in some way, but because of a configuration problem it isn't listening to external input and never will again (because it also can't hear any input that might fix the configuration).
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ncr100 7y agoI started using this expression in 2006 when developing apps for flip-phones. It was common for the phones to fail to reliably receive app installation files and mid-way through the process, disconnect their serial ports from my development computer. After that the phones would be, essentially, a brick. I did not have the technology to fix it - a JTAG connector and software to drive a reinstallation of what I assumed was the firmware.