zlacker

Bricked things absolutely can be unbricked, e.g. by opening them up and reflashing a component, or otherwise engaging a special-case recovery path.

>>catiop+(OP)
True, but they don't recover themselves automatically.

>>catiop+(OP)
Bricked things can only be unbricked because the word has gradually lost most of its meaning. At this rate some day you're going to hear someone say they bricked their phone and mean that it ran out of battery and needs to be recharged.

>>Athero+K6
No, this is what the word has always meant.

An embedded device with a failed bootloader update is considered “bricked”, even if you can open it up and reflash it with a valid bootloader.

I don’t know why folks are so insistent on gatekeeping the word, as if doing so demonstrates some superior personal knowledge.

>>catiop+l7
Some people don't just guard that word, they guard all words. We as a society even need to pass laws to protect the definition of words we use in commerce, like "ice cream" and "bread", otherwise people would abuse them to the point where they become meaningless.

>>catiop+(OP)
It's not a term I've seen used recently, but a bricked thing that literally cannot be unbricked through a simple repair is toasted. At least according to mid-nineties computer repair jargon. I wonder if there are regional dialects...

Weird discussion since we're talking about a piece of hardware that is working fine and doing exactly what it was told to do. They just pointed it in the wrong direction and need to wait for it to recover, which it is set up to do.

We wouldn't say a server with the router IP address misconfigured was "bricked." (or maybe we would... I guess the jargon changes, but that would seem pretty crazy to me)