zlacker

No, that's not true, and it's never been true. The definition was always "turned into a device which is electronically indistinguishable from a brick and unrecoverable." Maybe an expert could do some deep diving to bring it back, but if it's beyond recovery to most folks, then we'd call it a brick. If you have to desoldier a flash chip and sldier on a new one with a filesystem that isn't trashed or with corrected software, then we've debricked it, but that's really a deep level repair.

>>burnte+(OP)
Your division of "experts" vs "most folks" is doing a lot of work here, and speaks to my point.

Most folks don't really know how to use say Android fastboot or recovery modes either, yet we wouldn't call a device with a wiped system partition "bricked".

Most "bricks" are things like a bootloader getting erased. Reflashing that through the standard process of JTAG or another debug protocol is a straightforward action (after all, the manufacturer has to get the first bootloader on there to begin with). The port pinout and config info just hasn't been publicly documented by the manufacturer, which is what pushes it into the domain of "experts".

>>mindsl+x2
If doctors create the term "heart attack" and laypeople misuse it, that doesn't change the definition.

>>burnte+Zl
I don't really know how to connect your analogy. As far as I'm aware, the term "bricked" arose out of software/firmware modding communities (eg Android) to describe devices that were beyond their general abilities to straightforwardly fix.

>>mindsl+sr
No, bricked was a word IT techs were using at LEAST as early as the early 90s as that's when I learned it. I learned it when someone bricked a network switch in 93. Originally in the Android world (and before android with Symbian and others) bricked meant you flashed firmware that really killed it, maybe you can bring it back with a JTAG connection or something more extreme. Then as modding became more popular, they started being able to more easily recover these and UNbricking became a thing.