I'd seen your response before. I didn't find it informative.
To me, bricked means "requires exotic recovery procedure (or more) to repair." Existence of tooling in one manufacturer lab doesn't make something not "bricked". Releasing that stuff to the public makes it "soft bricked". Making it so that an ordinary user can do it makes it "not bricked anymore". When we say something is "bricked", the permanence is unknown.
Sitting with the drive powered for an hour without a data connection to let its firmware do internal housekeeping and maybe have the drive come (partially?) back, in an undocumented recovery procedure, is definitely somewhere murky on this spectrum.
> Existence of tooling in one manufacturer lab doesn't make something not "bricked".
I didn't say otherwise. Again you're attacking the idea that 'permanently broken' is meaningful.
You've shifted from attacking the term 'permanently broken' as unworkably imprecise, to attacking it as unknowable. Neither holds water. In real-word use, we just make do. It's not practical to give perfectly precise legalistic definitions.
We'd all agree that a severely water-damaged smartphone counts as permanently broken, and as bricked, regardless of whether it would be possible in principle for the device to be repaired at great expense.
> Releasing that stuff to the public makes it "soft bricked".
I agree that the availability of tooling can impact whether we consider something permanently broken. A failed hard-disk in an old games console might be enough to write off the whole machine, if the machine is hostile to replacement hard-disks and official repair services are no longer available (and their special tooling/software not made public). A failed hard-disk in a desktop computer, though, can easily be replaced.
> definitely somewhere murky on this spectrum
Again, of course there are edge cases. This is true of just about any categorisation we use, outside of mathematics. To refer back to my earlier example, it's not possible to give perfectly precise definitions of chair and table, but this doesn't much matter, the terms are still useful.
I think most agree anything not readily fixed by normal, known procedures is "bricked". But most things we call this are not really permanently broken (and we might be surprised to find some of them to be trivially recovered).
I don't really hear "bricked" in use for things damaged mechanically or by water. It's usually in conjunction with a failed upgrade, etc. Almost none of these things are really permanently broken, though some of them for practical purposes may be.
