A “brick” is an unusable electronic device due to corrupted firmware or physical damage. Some companies have protections in place to allow recovery, but some devices are beyond repair. The term originated in military slang and refers to the device being as useful as a brick. Recovery is possible in some cases with expert help or partitioned firmware.
A brick is a totally unusable piece of electronics with no hope of recovery. There are several ways an appliance can be blocked, ranging from corrupted firmware to physical damage to the hardware. Many companies produce hardware with protections in place that make it difficult to completely lock down their equipment, allowing people to reload the firmware or at least recover data from the device after it has been rendered inoperable.
The term “brick” entered the electronics vocabulary in the early 1990s and appears to have its origins in military slang. The implication is that a bricked-in piece of electronics is just as useful as a brick; the only thing it’s really useful for is as a doorstop. When something is particularly expensive or contains sensitive data, bricking it can be an immense pain and a source of frustration and misery.
One of the most common reasons for something to get stuck is a problem with the firmware. Classically, a device crashes while loading new firmware, causing the system to crash and rendering the device unusable. It is also possible for the firmware to become corrupted or for invalid firmware to be loaded onto a device. In some cases, companies have deliberately produced corrupted firmware to penalize people trying to unlock devices like mp3 players and cell phones, so that when the network flashes an update, devices with unauthorized software will fail.
Sometimes, an electronic item simply arrives in bricked form. In this case, the consumer is usually instructed to repackage it and send it back so that a replacement can be sent; the company can test the device to make sure the consumer hasn’t bricked it before replacing it. This problem is especially common with newly developed electronics, which can come with various problems that the engineers missed.
To truly be a brick, something must be broken beyond all hope of repair and recovery. However, many “masonry” objects are potentially recoverable, especially in expert hands. For example, some manufacturers produce partitioned firmware, allowing people to change the directory a device boots from in case it is locked up. In these cases, the device can be turned on and flashed with new firmware to restore the system. It is also sometimes possible to recover data from some bricked electronic devices, even if the electronics themselves are no longer usable.
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