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Comment by bromuro | Hacker News Reader

English is not my native language and this is the first time I hear about this “bricked” expression. What does it mean?

It 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.

Originally, "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.

I wonder what the replacement term will be. Probably "hard bricked"?

Hard / 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.

Rendered permanently inert, given the computational utility of a rectangular block of baked clay; banjaxed.

To render a device completely inoperable, turning your computer into an expensive brick.

I remember it was originally used for smartphones, which makes sense because of their size is comparable to an actual brick.

When computers were bigger heavier and not the size of cell phones, you could say "door stopped".

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".

It predates smartphones by at least a decade, maybe several decades. https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/488450/etymology...

Some manner of update or action attenuates the processing power of the device to that of a clay brick.

It’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)

Slang words are real. (And so is "ain't", and most words you can make up on the spot.)

Well duh. But that’s not the way I mean by real which everyone can understand, so you’re just being pedantic and annoying

FYI, 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.

> 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.

Right, I mentioned PSP because jailbreaking was specifically widespread for PSP.

What 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).

I 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.

It means that something made your device non functional, so it’s almost like your device is a brick or useless heavy load

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