> I was able to unbrick it
I know it's a nitpick, but if it can be repaired, it's not bricked.
[0] https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-400-unit/
To you and me:
Static electricity from the carpet discharging into the joystick port of a Commodore 64? Bricked.
Yanked a cable from my Raspberry Pi and had to reboot in an unconventional manner? Not bricked.
People were up arms but I call not bricked!
Does it require a soldering iron to fix it?
No. Not “bricked”
Yes. “bricked”
(But I also totally accept that technical people are going to lose the language war here, same as when I used to rant about rc quadcopters not being “drones” since they’re not autonomous.)
To others, having to do a full drive reformat may be as intimidating as using a soldering iron.
Contrast to the second point, where non-autonomous quadrocopters are emphatically not "drones". Unless you consider the IMU and feedback loops that keep it level "autonomous", since it is technically some degree of autonomy...
Anyway, I'd be a little more specific and say something is "bricked" when it cannot be repaired with the speaker's skill level or equipment.
Ultimate bricking would be frying an IC with e.g. heat or ESD. Good luck removing those few hundred atoms shorting something inside.
How would you called a device that meets a fate like that? Stuck? Blocked? Unaccessible?
The word appears to originate from the idea that a device has been turned into a brick. This seems a new meaning to me, as ‘bricked’ isn’t a word that previously meant ‘to turn the thing into a brick’.
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/488450/etymology...
Some devices that become "bricked" because the contents of their nonvolatile memory are incorrect can be "unbricked" using separate hardware (a debug board) that accesses this memory directly.[5] This is similar to the procedure for loading firmware into a new device when the memory is still empty. This kind of "bricking" and "unbricking" occasionally happens during firmware testing and development. In other cases software and hardware procedures, often complex, have been developed that have a good chance of unbricking the device. There is no general method; each device is different. There are also user-created modifier programs to use on bricked or partially bricked devices to make them functional. Examples include the Wiibrew program BootMii used to fix semi-bricked Nintendo Wiis, the Odin program used to flash firmware on Samsung Android devices,[6] or the fastboot Android protocol which is capable of reflashing a device with no software installed.[6]
With enough resources, one could fix almost anything. So what's enough to be bricked?
* Configured badly in a way that could be fixed in just software, but in a very unintuitive and undocumented way?
* Firmware overwritten with broken firmware, requiring special software and images to fix/update?
* Firmware overwritten with broken firmware, requiring you to open the case and attach a serial cable to a hidden connector fix it?
* Firmware overwritten with broken firmware, requiring you to attach thin test wires to a flash chip and bit-bang flash programming sequences?
* Firmware overwritten, requiring you to lift and replace the flash chip.
* Broken hardware components requiring extensive rework?
Whether something is irrevocably bricked or not depends upon what tooling, documentation, and skills you have. Someone releasing a new tool that makes it easier to recover/unbrick doesn't make it not have been bricked in the first place...
I know people who refer to their phone as “bricked” when the battery is flat.
As an example, if I have a network device so screwed up that I have to do a little power and connection dance to get it to reload via tftp, I'd call that a soft brick. If I have to solder in jtag pins, that's pretty firm. If the magic smoke has come out, that's definitely hard.
Edit: To be more constructive, how about a definition for “bricked” as “unable to be recovered by the intended users of the device through reasonably expected efforts.”
The term arose because a brick cannot be transformed into functioning electronic equipment. A device is said to be bricked when it is no more useful than a brick. If you drop your smartphone into water, and it shows no signs of life even after a couple of weeks of drying, you've bricked it.
The average user is not competent at repair, as that's a specialized skill. They might not know what to do with a laptop if you blanked its SSD, but we wouldn't call that laptop bricked.
This makes term "bricked" somewhat theoretical, as in practice almost any state of electronics can be turned back to functioning. In extreme cases you'll have to replace vital parts (if imagination forbids actually fixing broken microchips with a lab equipment), but in many cases it's still possible.
In common usage, we consider 'permanently broken' to be meaningful, we draw the line somewhere reasonable, and don't worry too much about giving a legalistic precise definition. I think my earlier examples stand up ok here. The phone is bricked, and the laptop is not. There may be edge cases where it might not be clear whether we can say whether a device is 'bricked' or not. That's not a problem. There might be an edge case in furniture where it's not clear if it's a chair or a table, but the categories of chair and table are still worth keeping.
...anyway it looks like a promising ARM-based computer ;-P
Dude, setting aside the argument itself, I never expected to see the Ship of Theseus busted out to win an internet debate... well done!
Surely a typical brick contains a significant amount of silicon and sufficient trace amounts of germanium/boron/phosphorus to dope it into useable semiconductors...
(That’d make for an awesome YouTube channel project. How I melted down and refined a brick into pure enough elements to make semiconductors and working electronics, in my backyard... I’d totally subscribe to that Patreon.)
I've got a dictionary full of terms for you that arose from one concept to mean something else. Literally. Also figuratively.
I fully support efforts to gently nudge deviations of the vernacular toward reason and rationality, especially before it it crystallizes into some abomination like "literally" has become. That way lies muddy thinking, and madness.
The price of language-reality congruence is eternal vigilance and kindhearted pedantry.
E.g. It's OK for "decimated" to mean "destroyed/removed a sizable part of" and not "killed precisely 10% of".
It's also OK for us to disagree on when the exact place an object becomes no more useful than a brick and to think that this could be a gray area. To me, something is slightly/soft bricked when it requires specialized, non-garden path recovery procedures to fix (e.g. a firmware flashing tool). It is hard bricked when it requires tools and processes only usually found in depot maintenance or manufacturer facilities, even if my home workshop happens to be capable of these things.
Of course, this means some things that are hard bricked could become soft bricked or even not bricked at all, if the manufacturer releases a tool or updates the normal software to deal with a situation.
But they have tooling on one test bench somewhere that could load new firmware and bring it back to life...
Is it bricked?
Is it bricked if they release those tools, but they require specialized repair skills?
Is it bricked if they release those tools and it's easy?
To me, bricked means "requires exotic recovery procedure (or more) to repair." Existence of tooling in one manufacturer lab doesn't make something not "bricked". Releasing that stuff to the public makes it "soft bricked". Making it so that an ordinary user can do it makes it "not bricked anymore". When we say something is "bricked", the permanence is unknown.
Sitting with the drive powered for an hour without a data connection to let its firmware do internal housekeeping and maybe have the drive come (partially?) back, in an undocumented recovery procedure, is definitely somewhere murky on this spectrum.
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.
I don't really hear "bricked" in use for things damaged mechanically or by water. It's usually in conjunction with a failed upgrade, etc. Almost none of these things are really permanently broken, though some of them for practical purposes may be.
avmich already did this, and it doesn't hold water. Please see my response to avmich's comment.