[miki123211]

There's physically no way to permanently "brick" an iPhone.

DFU mode boots entirely from read-only ROM, and from there, you can just restore everything via USB cable.

Same applies to Apple Silicon Macs. You can damage the system, recovery and emergency recovery volumes, but even then, you can still boot into DFU from ROM and re-initialize everything via another Mac.

This is in contrast to some PCs, where if you damage the BIOS (e.g. by suddenly losing power during a firmware update), your device may or may not be bricked. There have even been stories of peoples' computers being bricked via rm -rf /, due to removing everything at /sys/firmware/efi/efivars/ (which is actually stored inside the motherboard), and sometimes contains things that the motherboard won't boot without

[Andrew6rant]

> There's physically no way to permanently "brick" an iPhone.

There definitely are (If you count jailbroken iPhones). I've managed to brick one by removing all thermal throttling limits and subsequently damaging the motherboard with the world's shittiest watercooling setup.

Can't use DFU to restore if you've got damaged hardware

[mystified5016]

"Bricking" is typically used to describe software failures specifically. Physical damage isn't "bricking" in the traditional sense, it's just broken.

Besides, physical damage is the obvious exception to GP's statement. Nobody is reading this and thinking that a ROM DFU will recover a phone that is physically destroyed.

[butlike]

im sure they meant "within reason."

no amount of monkeying around with the software will brick the iphone (botched updates, etc.). Once we get to hardware failures the vectors are innumerable. Lightning strikes. Device drops from height. Botched water cooling. Magnifying glass lasers. Children's vomit...

[xmodem]

> There have even been stories of peoples' computers being bricked via rm -rf /

I would expect that most systems should be recoverable from this state with a CMOS clear.

[achierius]

"physically" is overstating it. Certainly during development it's possible, which means that -- conditioned on a bad enough bug -- it could hypothetically happen to customers too. Not that I think that's likely, of course, but it is physically possible.

[bookofjoe]

Right now someone in Fort Meade is falling off their chair laughing...

[jchw]

I'm gonna walk through this because I have a bit of experience here on the computer side of things, but I'm not really making an excuse for the fact that the PC version of this is less user-friendly; from my perspective, I fully respect that Apple has done a good job with user experience where PC manufacturers have lagged. However, my main concern is devices turning to e-waste, so the important thing for that isn't UX, it's just how plausible it is to recover once you've bricked. With that out of the way...

> This is in contrast to some PCs, where if you damage the BIOS (e.g. by suddenly losing power during a firmware update), your device may or may not be bricked.

I accidentally destroyed the firmware on a machine that did not have any recovery features, when flashing modified UEFI images, leaving it mostly inoperable. I wound up recovering it using flashrom and a Raspberry Pi. I think this counts as a hard brick, but the modular nature of PCs (e.g. most BIOS chips are on sockets so you can pull them out easily) it's not nearly as big of an issue if you hard-bricked a device that's more integrated and locked down. It's not instant e-waste because no bricks are permanent.

(It's a little harder for laptops, but I did also flashrom a laptop in a similar fashion, in-circuit using a SOIC8 clamp. This was not a brick recovery but rather messing with coreboot.)

Definitely not as much for the faint of heart, but a repair technician could do it for you. Alternatively, for PCs with socketed BIOS, you can buy a new EEPROM that's already flashed with the right firmware--they were readily available on eBay last I looked.

That was probably a decade ago or more by now. Many modern PC motherboards from many vendors have mitigations for this; it was a common enough pain point after all. For example, my desktop PC has an embedded controller that can boot and rewrite the flash chip for you, using a copy of BIOS from a USB stick. (Works even if the CPU isn't installed. Pretty cool.)

> There have even been stories of peoples' computers being bricked via rm -rf /, due to removing everything at /sys/firmware/efi/efivars/ (which is actually stored inside the motherboard), and sometimes contains things that the motherboard won't boot without

EFI vars are stored in NVRAM, not the EEPROM. You can usually clear that a couple of ways:

- Use an integrated NVRAM reset system. Some machines have a way to do this listed in their manual. On desktop PC motherboards, it tends to be a jumper you set for a few seconds. Sometimes you will have an easier option, like a button somewhere, or even possibly a key combination at boot (Long time Macintosh fans probably have memorized the NVRAM reset key chord for Apple computers... I wonder if it still works on Apple Silicon.)

- Remove the battery for a few seconds. Usually easily accessible on a desktop. Usually a little less easy to get to on a laptop, but nothing absurd, usually just some screws.

Certainly it could be easier to recover from, I'd say it's actually not very easy to brick a typical desktop PC in a particularly permanent fashion. The only time I've ever done it was because I was modifying my UEFI image intentionally. Screwing up EFI vars doesn't make most systems unbootable. I have corrupted my EFI vars quite a few times trying to do funny things. UEFI implementations do tend to be buggy, but not all of them are that catastrophically bad.

--

Now... as for whether or not an Apple Silicon device can "physically" be bricked by software, the most obvious way to do that would be to wear the SSD down to the point where it can no longer be rewritten. I think the M4 Mac Mini finally no longer solders these and that the Mac Minis do have a way you can recover from this brick (using another Mac to restore to a new SSD) but there are many Macs where if the SSD is destroyed, it's pretty hard to fix since you need Apple tools that are hard to obtain if you want to pair a new SSD. This is unfortunate because Apple has often had dodgy hardware choices around the SSD (e.g. the notorious TPS62180 buck converter) and doesn't always use SSDs that have the best reliability (IIRC they use a lot of Kioxia in the newer Apple Silicon devices, which are not considered to be bad devices by any means, but are generally considered less durable than e.g. Samsung SSDs.)

Rather than have an Apple device become ewaste due to software issues, in recent years, it is much more likely that it will become ewaste due to hardware issues, as a result of parts pairing and having failure-prone components that are not modular even when they really can and should be (Good on them for rectifying this lately, e.g., with the Mac Mini SSD, but it's a bit sad that it took this long. And on the note of that SSD... Apple, you really could've used a standard electrical interface for that.)

This is somewhat a testament to Apple's software and system design, but it's simultaneously a condemnation of their recent track record with repair, too. Best we can hope is that they don't go backwards from this point forward, because they created a lot of devices that will become ewaste over time for almost no gain for anyone. (I strongly dislike but can understand the justification for something like parts pairing in iPhones and iPads, but much less so for similar sorts of mechanisms in computers.)

[timschumi]

> Screwing up EFI vars doesn't make most systems unbootable. I have corrupted my EFI vars quite a few times trying to do funny things. UEFI implementations do tend to be buggy, but not all of them are that catastrophically bad.

For what it's worth, I have a laptop here that can be irrevocably (short of having a flash memory dump on-hand that can be flashed back) bricked just by messing around with EFI variables through fully intentional operations (i.e. operations that would be available to any program with Administrator privileges on Windows, or the root user on Linux).

[jchw]

As far as I know virtually all of the EFI vars will be stored on battery-backed NVRAM, so the usual solution is to just clear that, by removing the CMOS battery. I am pretty sure the only solution are things you definitely can not read or write from the host OS (e.g. BIOS passwords.) Does require partially disassembling the laptop though, and I know there's at least a couple random models of laptop that actually stop working if you clear the NVRAM (lol)

[jchw]

*only solution = only exceptions

Not sure how that happened.

[leptons]

>Rather than have an Apple device become ewaste due to software issues, in recent years, it is much more likely that it will become ewaste due to hardware issue

Apple not supporting their hardware after a short time is a software issue causing e-waste. I have a big box full of non-viable Apple hardware that is working perfectly well, Apple just decided to stop supporting all those devices - a bunch of tablets, a couple apple tvs, an old apple watch, several laptops, etc.

Sure, other manufacturers do this too, but none as badly as Apple does IMHO.

[Koshcheiushko]

rm -rf is nightmare, if used mistakenly. I myself have been victim of this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43775027

[nomel]

If you had root access on your iPhone, to do that, you would see a recovery message on your phone at the next reboot. Then, plugging it into your macBook, you would get a popup asking if you would like to restore it. Bricks don't usually have software restore prompts.