Comment by treesknees
7 months ago
I wish people would stop using the term “bricked” for fully recoverable failure conditions.
Jeep has already confirmed they’ve pushed out a fix. That is not bricked.
7 months ago
I wish people would stop using the term “bricked” for fully recoverable failure conditions.
Jeep has already confirmed they’ve pushed out a fix. That is not bricked.
If it's not user recoverable at the time, and it renders the product as useless as a brick, then it seems like the most accurate word to use, from the customer perspective. Some people will prefer stricter semantics, sure. It was later still able to download and apply updates over the air to undo the problem, so it was a milder form of bricking.
I've had some pretty nasty brickings of devices, like overwriting the bootloader, that I've been able to recover from by getting it into some barely documented system on chip mode with a special cable, booting a new bootloader into RAM via the cable, and reflashing that way. One could go to the extreme and say any flash storage chip where all software bits are directly writable by a factory tool is technically unbrickable. But the customers won't see it that way.
I would love to read the essay that proves the word "bricked" has a highly specific technical meaning that excludes recoverable failure.
The entire premise is that you’ve turned the device into a brick. If the failure is recoverable, it’s not a brick.
8 replies →
If you can desolder and replace a few ball grid array ICs and then get Linux running on it, it was never True Scotsman's fired clay brick bricked. It was only Lego brick bricked.
I've "bricked" many automotive systems where they weren't truly unrecoverable, but doing so involved another team disassembling them. The parts were cheaper to throw out instead.
Being strict about the word "bricked" and limiting it to the truly unrecoverable situations just makes it nigh-on useless.
Very few things can make a modern system truly unrecoverable if one is willing to pour unreasonable resources into them. It's incredibly common to be in a situation where a system is unrecoverable by you though. There's no practical difference between these two except that one depends on the surrounding context.
There are a thousand ways to describe this without misusing and ruining a word like “bricked”.
Being strict about a word makes it more useful, not useless. A useless word is one with no identifiable meaning, one which requires copious clarifications, or one which invites confusion and debate instead of delivering meaning.
I actually think your first sentence is a spot on definition for 'bricked'. However, this specific scenario does not meet the criteria you've defined. Nobody is throwing out their car because it was only temporarily disabled. Another OTA update fixed it minutes later.
The first sentence is an example that also conflicts with a strict definition of "bricked", not something comparable to the situation in the article.
The definition I was offering just appends "by you" to the strict definition and encompasses both in some contexts.
I think the reasonable extent of "bricked" is: can you plug in a USB cord and use publicly available software to fix it? Or wireless equivalent.
Most automotive systems would be bricked by this definition. Very little of the tooling is open source/publicly available, reprogramming is usually a specific, non-default mode gated by passwords or cryptography and inaccessible to end users.
Apparently for some people the update makes it worse.
https://www.jlwranglerforums.com/forum/threads/2024-4xe-loss...
Not even two weeks after going all-in on enterprise vibe coding including for "engineering workflows".
> [Stellantis'] determination to apply AI across every part of the enterprise
https://www.stellantis.com/en/news/press-releases/2025/octob...
Wikipedia says
> A brick (or bricked device) is an electronic device, specially consumer electronics (such as a mobile device, game console, computer, etc.) that is no longer functional.
These jeeps are no longer functional.
Speaking of terminology, though, "crashed" really takes on an ominous meaning. I am really glad not to write software for safety-critical systems.
I agree, but I can't think of another term that would convey the severity of this offending update.
How about "catastrophic"? Or "total failure"? Or "we can't find the word to convey the severity"?
Anything else than words that already have existing meanings. With that motivation, they could have said "... update that exploded all ..." since it's a really severe situation, but obviously we/they should use words that has the right meaning instead.
"Jeep just pushed an update that was catastrophic to all 2024..."
"Jeep just pushed an update that was a total failure to all 2024..."
Idk... Doesn't have a very good ring, because "catastrophic" and "total failure" in the realm of tech usually means something that if you try again it could possibly work.
As I said, I agree that "brick" is a good word, I just don't think any of the alternatives are any better.
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"Jeep pushed an update that made moving vehicles uncontrollable"
If we are allowed to move the goal posts anywhere we want then nothing is ever bricked unless it is smashed to a powder.
ffs. really? the clickbait headlines need to stop - I'm for full banishment of people who post them and the publications they came in on.