> Existence of tooling in one manufacturer lab doesn't make something not "bricked". I didn't say otherwise. Again you're attacking the idea that 'permanently

> Existence of tooling in one manufacturer lab doesn't make something not "bricked". I didn't say otherwise. Again you're attacking the idea that 'permanently broken' is meaningful. You've shifted from attacking the term 'permanently broken' as unworkably imprecise, to attacking it as unknowable. Neither holds water. In real-word use, we just make do. It's not practical to give perfectly precise legalistic definitions. We'd all agree that a severely water-damaged smartphone counts as permanently broken, and as bricked, regardless of whether it would be possible in principle for the device to be repaired at great expense. > Releasing that stuff to the public makes it "soft bricked". I agree that the availability of tooling can impact whether we consider something permanently broken. A failed hard-disk in an old games console might be enough to write off the whole machine, if the machine is hostile to replacement hard-disks and official repair services are no longer available (and their special tooling/software not made public). A failed hard-disk in a desktop computer, though, can easily be replaced. > definitely somewhere murky on this spectrum Again, of course there are edge cases. This is true of just about any categorisation we use, outside of mathematics. To refer back to my earlier example, it's not possible to give perfectly precise definitions of chair and table, but this doesn't much matter, the terms are still useful.