[da_chicken]

Brick means "to render a device permanently inoperable." There is no hard or soft involved. Bricked is bricked. If you can recover the device without replacing hardware or components, you didn't brick it, you just fucked it up.

[korethr]

I think it's fair to say that different people have different thresholds for "bricked" depending on their awareness, willingness, and ability with regard to various repair techniques that may be to hand. To my mother, a virus that causes her laptop to bluescreen upon boot is bricked. There's nothing she can do about that. To me, you gotta do something like wreck the firmware, and even that's not quite permanent, as I am not afraid of soldering tools.

[kbenson]

> I think it's fair to say that different people have different thresholds for "bricked" depending on their awareness, willingness, and ability with regard to various repair techniques that may be to hand.

I think it's fair to say that people misuse terms through ignorance often, but that doesn't mean we should always just say "okay, let's extend the definition to include that too". It's useful to resist the erosion of terms until it becomes unuseful to do so. It often gets you marked as a pedant in a derogatory way, but it serves a very real and useful purpose, which is the preservation of definition which helps clear communication.

It's a losing battle, but it's a worthwhile fight.

[josteink]

Your grandma is not going to say the machine is “bricked”. She will say it’s not working.

Bricked is a technical term used by techies, and it has one specific meaning.

Bricked is bricked.

[zeep]

to me, soft bricked means that you have to do something out of the ordinary to fix it, something that most people would not know how to do, even if it's just a software problem (maybe it's a new problem that had no known solutions yet)... http://unbrick.itcse.com/soft-brick-vs-hard-bricked-vs-broke...

[kbenson]

Common use of the term predates Android phones by at least a decade, so I'm going to resist this new "soft-brick" designation as both misleading and unuseful.

Having your phone go into a boot loop or corrupting your MBR has historically not been considered "bricked", but just having a corrupted install. It's generally not that hard to fix or find someone to fix, which is why it wouldn't be considered bricked.

Getting a device to a state where it's unrecoverable, or at least requires custom equipment and lots of knowledge about it to fix (and I'm not talking USB key fob and how to reset an MBR, or even a serial port connection, I'm talking JTAG connectors).

People familiar with putting experimental linux hobbyist distros on devices with no support, such as the Sharp Zaurus or wireless routers circa 2000 know what this means.

[zeep]

JTAG connector is not that much different from USB at at stage... you just have to remove the case to access it or solder a connector to existing pins? I would call that hard brick... and if JTAG doesn't work, then it might be considered broken by some and need electronic part(s) replaced

[kbenson]

Are you comparing plugging in a USB fob to soldering a connector to pins, and that's what you're referring to as "not that much different"?

I would consider any time you have to solder a custom connector onto the device to fix it as being bricked. The equipment, knowledge and capability to do that are very rare.