| There is a parallel in non-electronic hardware. Certain safes irreparably break after several attempts to incorrectly or violently unlock them. Nobody — neither a thief, nor a legitimate owner, nor the manufacturer can open them. The only option to reclaim the contents is to very slowly and with a great effort to cut them using serious industrial machines. This is a feature that customers ask for. They want to be sure that snatching their safe in an attempt to quietly brute-force the lock or the door in a garage does not make sense. It prevents such attempts, and they agree to pay for that with the risk to turn their safe into a piece of scrap if they screw up badly. Same applies to locking bootloaders, firmware, etc. Sometimes it's better to throw away a device than to allow a risk of tampering. Of course, the owner should voluntarily and consciously make this decision. In the case of DRM-ridden media players, or even phones, the consumer may have different preferences but not given a choice and even not made aware, which, of course, is not great. |