Hacker News Reader

Comment by geor9e | Hacker News Reader

If it's not user recoverable at the time, and it renders the product as useless as a brick, then it seems like the most accurate word to use, from the customer perspective. Some people will prefer stricter semantics, sure. It was later still able to download and apply updates over the air to undo the problem, so it was a milder form of bricking.

I've had some pretty nasty brickings of devices, like overwriting the bootloader, that I've been able to recover from by getting it into some barely documented system on chip mode with a special cable, booting a new bootloader into RAM via the cable, and reflashing that way. One could go to the extreme and say any flash storage chip where all software bits are directly writable by a factory tool is technically unbrickable. But the customers won't see it that way.

View on HN

I would love to read the essay that proves the word "bricked" has a highly specific technical meaning that excludes recoverable failure.

The entire premise is that you’ve turned the device into a brick. If the failure is recoverable, it’s not a brick.

Hard to imagine unrecoverable device. Maybe physically melting it into the brick will do the job. In any other case it is recoverable: you can replace whole memory with a bootloader, other corrupted modules and recover device.

I think this may have more to do with a combination of insufficient imagination and fault-tolerant manufacturing.

There are plenty of devices that can be rendered inoperable via non-physical destruction. There used to be more of them, but manufacturers try to make it impossible because it’s a support nightmare.

I think of it as generally meaning "unrecoverable for the current owner" or "unrecoverable for the average consumer", not "even the manufacturer, with hardware access, couldn't find a way to factory reset this."

It's also not literally a brick, regardless of future functionality. The ability to metaphorically compare it to a brick doesn't seem to hinge critically on whether the metaphorical brick is a permanent metaphorical brick or a temporary metaphorical brick.

Sure. I’m not going to nitpick exactly how long or how severely something has been rendered inoperable. If somebody wants to refer to their phone as a brick because they’re camping and forgot the charger, that doesn’t bother me.

I’m just pushing back on the idea that “bricked” is some random word with no meaning whatsoever.

This is truly one of the most HNey threads I've read in a minute.

we have a saying for that, soft brick.

That wording manages to avoid answering the question entirely. It just shifted the ambiguity from defining the word “brick” to defining the word “recoverable”. Recoverable by your grandmother with dementia, before the next Matlock episode airs? Recoverable by one person on Earth for whom unbricking this one thing is their special interest? Recoverable by a hypothetical future technotopian society that we predict will be capable of vaporizing atoms and rearranging them into any desired form? Do you draw a hard line in the sand for everyone to share one definition? Or is it entirely subjective, a tautology, a self-fulfilling prophecy - meaning anyone’s feeling of brickiness and recoverability is valid by definition?

If you can desolder and replace a few ball grid array ICs and then get Linux running on it, it was never True Scotsman's fired clay brick bricked. It was only Lego brick bricked.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com