Brick (electronics)

Bricking a device may also be done intentionally as punishment for severe transgressions involving its use, but this is exceptionally rare and typically only done as a last resort.

Some devices include a backup copy of their firmware, stored in fixed ROM or writable non-volatile memory, which is not normally accessible to processes that could corrupt it.

A "soft bricked" device may show signs of life, but fails to boot or may display an error screen.

Soft bricked devices can usually be fixed relatively easily; for example, a soft bricked iOS device may display a screen instructing the user to plug it into a computer to perform an operating system recovery using iTunes computer software.

Some kernel bugs[ambiguous] have been known that affect the /data partition in the eMMC chip, which becomes corrupted during certain operations such as wiping and flashing.

[citation needed] Another example of a hard brick was related to a EFI firmware bug which could allow users to run rm on the EFI system variables mounted to the filesystem from within the operating system, resulting in a bricked bootloader that would require ROM soldering tools to repair.

In principle any device with rewritable firmware, or certain crucial settings stored into flash or EEPROM memory, can be bricked.

Amongst devices known to have bricking issues are: older PCs (more recent models often have dual BIOSes or some other form of protection), many mobile phones, handheld game consoles like the PlayStation Portable and Nintendo DS, video game consoles like the Wii, Xbox 360, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One, many SCSI devices and some lines of hard disk drives and routers.

[citation needed] Electric cars such as the Tesla Roadster (first generation) can brick if the battery is completely discharged.

[11] iOS offers a similar "Activation Lock" feature via the "Find My iPhone" security software, where a device can be remotely prevented from operating (even after it has been erased), protected by the owner's Apple ID.

For example, Apple dropped support for OS X El Capitan in October 2018, and on 30 September 2021 the built-in security certificate expired, rendering users unable to connect to or use any iCloud services.