It's not "bricked" if you can fix it in Recovery Mode.
Still bad that it's happening, but the term "bricked" is thrown around so flippantly these days. If a piece of tech is bricked, it's not recoverable at all.
The original source[0] states that access to Recovery Mode is not possible, at least in some cases. One user there reports[1] that the device shows no signs of life--no power, no fans spinning, nothing:
> No power at all. I tried SMC and PRAM reset but sadly was unable to do either since my computer won’t even turn on.
Computer went to sleep after the update. This was on Friday. Haven't been able to do any kind of thing on it. Trackpad 'clicks' but no screen, not touchbar, nothing (2018 Macbook Pro).
Called apple, they tld me it had to go a store, unfortunately where I live, due to quarantine there are no shops available to pick it, and we aren't allowed to drive outside our district.
Will try the apple configurator idea someone posted below and will report back. Just need to find a cable that supports both power and data that is USB a to USB c.
If your entire startup is dependent on one single Macbook there is something severely wrong with your business model and I hope your customers and/or investors are aware of this risk before giving you any money.
Obviously depending on a laptop for runtime code would be bad, but plenty of early stage startups depend heavily on a small number of machines for customer support and continued development.
Probably a bigger issue isn’t that they’re a single laptop failure away from collapse, the bigger problem is that replacing a laptop right now would be unusually difficult.
In the world of git and cheaply available easy to use backup software, there is zero excuse to not have backups of everything to load on another machine. Even if you want to avoid the cloud and keep it local, a 128gb USB3 drive is under $50.
“A small number of machines” is not what we are talking about. We’re talking about one single consumer-grade laptop that would collapse the entire business forever.
Giving the benefit of the doubt; it’s entirely possible they have that setup, with the tacit assumption that if their machine died they could buy another same day.
Now, you really can’t buy another laptop same day.
Yeah. I gave my MBP (late 2016 “Esc”) to the Apple Store in London for repairs on 12 February. They decided to replace it (yay) and the replacement is scheduled to reach me the week after next. That’s about 10 weeks without my main machine, thanks to SARS-CoV-2. Really drives home the need for a contingency plan.
Might not be a bad idea to buy another laptop (cheap) and just boot it up once a month to make sure you can use it, and if your system dies, then just pull that one out and use it while Apple RMAs your primary. If the cheap laptop doesn't have enough power, just connect to an Amazon Workspace or something and use that until your normal laptop can work again.
Tried it all, nothing worked. Even the DFU revive/restore.
Tomorrow will call a close enough store that seems to be (stated on their website) doing pick-ups and see if they can come and pick it.
My main concern now is they will try to try and charge 1000 or so euros for a repair and I will have to eat the cost as I can't really ask for a replacement one from company or friends since everyone is stuck at home
All possible things. 30 seconds, 60 seconds. 10 seconds then plug in cable. SMC reset. DFU mode (it enters dfu mode, but restore doesn't work). I spent the last 48 hours trying to bring it back to life. Unless Apple releases some kind of software we can use on another mac to 'fix' this one, I don't feel it will be fixed without shipping it to them.
Confirmed; this is what happened to my 16" after this install. I needed to do a DFU restore (using Apple Configurator 2 -- you can download it to your hopefully spare MacBook from the app store) to get my mac back up and running. Unfortunately, for some reason, after the DFU restore, my 16" came back up to do a full reinstall, and I had to restore my files from backup.
I hope Apple doesn’t expect that everyone has a “Spare Macbook” laying around. I’ve been experiencing random system crashes when anything connects via TB3, and 3 random Kernel panics since the update.
The SSD in a T2 Mac is encrypted in the same way that an iPhone is, so if the DFU crashes hard enough you’ll have to regenerate new keys and that’s equivalent to drive zero.
No, it’s not possible to use a FileVault recovery key at this stage of repair.
It’s not failure, it’s secure by design to prevent attackers/governments from stealing your files without consent.
Under DFU brick and reset circumstances, the private key is gone, because otherwise an attacker could just upload a hacked firmware via DFU and access all your files.
I assume the installer uses a different process that performs a DFU upgrade-in-place that safely manages the handoff using signed code and such, but that’s not the process we get as a last restore described above.
If you don’t have off-device backups, you’re accepting the risk of losing all your data at any time due to any number of possible failures (software and hardware). Not much use getting upset about this specific case.
Not sure what DFU means as I'm not familiar with Mac. With any other encryption, it doesn't matter what the state of my system is. As long as I have the key, I can always decrypt it. And it's not a vulnerability. Without the key, the data is effectively inaccessible for everybody else (except maybe somebody with a quantum computer).
The T2 chip itself (runs bridgeOS which is like watchOS) do. It is used only to recover the firmware of the T2, AFAIK it can't be used to write to the SSD directly.
The checkra1n team recently showed that all Macs with a T2 chip are vulnerable to checkm8 exploit used to jailbreak iPhones, and this could persist for a while due to the T2 chip staying on between application processor reboots.
This allows override of mic disconnect (except on the newest models which switched to hardware disconnect), Secure Boot/Firmware Password, and allows you to bypass Apple's signing of Intel ME firmware, TB3 firmware, and CPU microcode. Whether or not there is still Intel signing after that is unknown, but there are already some sort of issues with the host key being leaked on that. The one useful feature I can think of is allowing SSD replacement (you still have to find a way to resolder ofc) and Touch Bar customization.
I think the most likely attack vector for this is an evil maid style attack where corrupted T2 firmware is loaded that rewrites the contents of the SSD while macOS is running to launch further exploit code on that platform.
The one thing not to worry about is if you have FileVault turned on with a password, that still can't be cracked because your password is not stored anywhere on the device. But the BitLocker-style automatic encryption with no password that just locks the SSD to that specific T2 chip isn't useful anymore.
hi, thank you for posting this. I was fascinated by the checkm8 exploit since I read about it last September. Completely unknown to me was that T2 Mac's were also vulnerable to this. With all the vulnerabilities that are now open due to this, i'm questioning was it even worth ever putting these chips inside Macbooks? In retrospect, would they have been better off just scrapping this idea completely? Because the way you put it, due to the checkm8 exploit the T2 is now practically useless in everything it was originally meant to do.
Right now, yes, but in usual circumstances you could just borrow a friend's box, your IT department could fix it, or you could have a el-cheapo Mac (either an old one or like a Mini from 2010) that can run Configurator (which doesn't require a recent version of OS X, I don't think).
Still sucks, just a bit less. not really different than an iPhone, except that you can rebuild those on Windows (for now).
"Bricked" is relative, depending on your skill level.
For some consumers, if recovery mode doesn't work that might be the end of line.
However, there are more advanced users that can access the storage via another system and fix it there, hook up via serial port or JTAG and flash new firmware, or even desolder and replace chips.
On the far other end of the spectrum, there's going to be people that consider "doesn't show the normal UI after I press the power button" as bricked.
If you go that route, "bricked" is now indistinguishable from "broke," and we already have a word for that. Broke. We would have then gone from a situation where we had two different states and names for each of those states to a situation where we have two words for the very same, very fuzzy state and no way to talk about the other state.
It makes a mockery of the idea of advice. Imagine your parents calling you and telling you that their machine is bricked. Well, I guess they must buy a new one and the old must go to electronic recycling. No need for a diagnostic of any kind, it's bricked.
Linguistic descriptivism will be the death of communication and standards. Only pushing back at the creep will allow people to discuss anything technical. Imagine the trend should it overtake medicine. If a certain kind of stroke is suspected, the patient should take aspirin right away. No, aspirin-aspirin, not ibuprofen. Then you have someone who says, "Well, ibuprofen is an aspirin sure!"
As much as I would like precise and accurate language, the reality is that people have varying degrees of knowledge of any field. That is why computer technicians and doctors alike have to ask deeper questions when making a diagnosis.
Even within a field, people may have slightly different interpretations of what a word means. Take consumer electronics. Say someone plugged in the wrong power supply and blew an inductor. If you don't know what a power supply filter is, it's garbage. If you do know what's going on, it's a simple repair. Now look at the case of a bad firmware update, where the device cannot reach recovery mode. Someone with a knowledge of embedded software development may know how to fix that, particularly if they have connections with the vendor. Most people will consider it damaged beyond repair. The thing is, you can have one person who is knowledgeable about software and another about electronics having entirely different interpretations of what bricked means. The only real commonality in the definition is, "I cannot repair it." For someone with negligible knowledge about how consumer electronics, that is going to have a very broad application.
Personally, I think that bricked means that it can only be repaired with specialized tools (including soldering irons or JTAG interfaces). But hey, I'm sure a lot of people would beg to differ.
Bricked, to me, means it is physically just fine, but it doesn’t work due to some kind of software issue.
“I bricked my phone and had to spend a whole day reading obscure guides to three different levels of embedded software before I could get it working again” feels like a perfectly valid sentence. You can fix a bricked thing, just like you can fix a broken thing, but both require some investment of time and possibly the use of tools that you won’t usually find outside the hands of specialists.
imo "Bricked" means you turned your piece of electronics into a brick, it cannot be recovered. Otherwise as mentioned before, it's just "broken", which can be recovered from in most cases.
A bricked device usually can be recovered using only software tools and sometimes a special cable. Sometimes those tools or cables are only possessed by the manufacturer, which frustrates consumers and makes it seem like the devices are unrecoverable, but they’re not.
A broken device, on the other hand, can’t be recovered using software tools or a special cable because it contains broken parts that must be repaired or replaced.
A physically broken device might still be functional though, so personally your terms are backwards.
A bricked device has a slight chance of recovery, if you have the tools/skills/training. It is a brick until that repair with high applitude is completed.
Something that is broke doesn't mean it is functional or not, just not at a perfectly working condition to worse. it might be repaired by doing a reset of a device, or something more advanced.
This is from my experience dealing with non-technical people who are mechanically inclined, but not technically inclined. they will call with a "broke" device that just needs a reset since they have too many users in a system all attempting to run the same device on different things. (Sorry keeping vague to keep me out of hot water). They will also call in with something "bricked" because the device won't function due to a damaged USB port, and they don't have the skill set/components to solder a port on something electronic. And then further down the scale it is a paperweight when it won't boot and is a piece of hardware they hate.
I disagreed with GP's use of the term bricked to mean unrecoverable. You seem to agree with me because you wrote that a bricked device can be recovered with the proper tools/skills/training. I hadn't considered partially-working devices, but I think you're right that they shouldn't be properly called bricked.
The threads here show that even highly technical people disagree on what conditions should be considered bricked versus broken. To a non-technical person whose device isn't working, however, there is no practical difference.
I actually changed my mind a little after posting that comment. I think it was mentioned elsewhere also, but even something that I would consider "bricked" could still probably be recovered by someone with access to the right tools (ability to reflash via JTAG, replacing chips etc.)
I would refine my definition to be that a "bricked" device is something that has occurred via a failed software update making the device inoperable to all but the tiniest subset of users.
So...I generally agree with the idea that it is more useful to have two terms that mean something distinct than two terms that both mean a fuzzy version of the same thing. In that, despite linguistic history, or the common parlance of whatever time or place, I think "literally" is useful as a concept that should disallow it from use as a term for exaggeration. Because sometimes context does not expose "I am literally going to kill you"'s meaning, and it is useful to know if that's literal or not.
However, I think the situation you might find here is that, if you define "bricked" as a situation which is literally unrepairable, almost nothing is ever bricked. Which similarly makes it a not very useful term. Bricking would be a term exclusive to devices which have been...exposed to an intense EMP, or run through an oven. Situations which, while they may occasionally happen, happen so rarely that no one would ever use the word.
Bricked specifically means it’s unrepairable (ie: it’s now a paperweight, a brick).
It’s fair to say “bricked” is a sub-category of “broke” but if something is software repairable then it isn’t bricked.
Also aspirin and ibuprofen are very different chemicals. I wouldn’t advise conflating the two. The resulting effect could be worse than the brick/broke problem we are discussing ;)
If a device requires extraordinary measures most people cannot or will not take in order to "unbrick" it, then it's possible for the usage to be correct even if such a procedure exists.
For example - years ago, NVIDIA got in some hot water over some of their mobile GPUs getting so toasty some of the solder points broke, leading to bricked systems. If you were the adventurous sort, you could heat the laptop enough to reflow the solder and end up with an unbricked system, but that's not an approach most people are going to take.
Anything can be recovered with enough effort, technical knowhow and the right equipment. The distinction is what can be realistically repaired. Generally the term “unbricking” only exists because people overuse the term “bricked” (eg a phone stuck in a boot cycle isn’t a “brick”, it’s just “stuck in a boot cycle”. However if you do manage to fix a device by specialist hardware repairs then yes, I think it’s fair to say you’ve “unbricked” it.
You're all just messing with that n-gate.com guy, right?
(FWIW: If the terms are to be interpreted relative to the device owner's competence level, we also need to prosecute people saying "You're dead to me" for murder)
I agree. We already live in a world where many people use the phrases "hard drive", "CPU" and "computer" interchangeably when talking about a desktop computer.
Is the power system in your house bricked if you don't know how to reset the fuse? Is your car bricked if your battery dies and you need help to replace it?
Maybe, but this sounds really strange to my ears. I think for me the difference between bricked and non bricked is the expense of the repair, and maybe if it's more than the value of the device. If the wiring in your house is all melted after lightning strike then it's bricked. If you total your car it's bricked.
It’s not just money but time, research, and ease. If you are in the desert with no cell connection and your car encounters a failure condition, even though you can pay to have it fixed, for all intents and purposes, to you it is bricked.
For a lot of people, any non-normal state == bricked. Especially now, when the genius bar isn't open.
And yes, there's a difference between a soft brick and a hard brick, and it depends on your ability to repair.
Getting my phone stuck in a bootloop is usually a soft brick, but my Pixel went into one a few years ago for no apparent reason (likely mobo failure) and that was beyond my capacity to repair or diagnose, so it's bricked.
It is the sort of nonsense we have to put up with when people start abusing a well-established term to get attention rather than to convey information -- though, in this case, it seems some machines really have been bricked.
To be sure, a soft brick is a pile of clay or mud, not a brick at all. It has neither the form or function of a brick, and therefore is the perfect analogy to this vociferous misnomer.
In my experience people call those sorts of things broken or not working, rather than (soft or hard) bricked. So people would say things like "the power went out in my house and soft bricked my TV until the power company turned it back on"? It's interesting how language evolves.
That doesn't seem to align with where you said that any non-normal state is bricked, and that the difference between soft and hard bricked is your ability to repair it.
I consider bricked to be anything you need specialized tools for. So JTAG-fiddly-stuff-required would be bricked, but if I can get the thing working by moving some jumpers or entering some advanced recovery mode while reading about it on the internet, that's not bricked. It's also bricked if you have to replace hardware, like if you have to replace a chip or a board.
I agree. From the modding days bricked always ment hardware hack was required.. I have the same gripe about how the word is used now. Glad to see it’s not just me
Dictionary definitions are not formal definitions, they are attempts to capture usage. And they are almost invariably approximations except when explicitly specifying otherwise, and outside of the the more lavish of the unabridged dictionaries are also almost in invariably simplified, both in the number of definitions of any term presented and often the individual definitions, for brevity at the expense of accuracy.
Yes, but to use a term in a technically relevant way, it needs to be tied to reality; if not, it's just marketing jargon or pseudo-tech speak. The best technical definition for this case is not by how it is most commonly understood, but how it most commonly applies. Dragonwriter makes a compelling case in that it is most commonly true that a user won't have access to the specialized hardware required to "unbrick" the device.
"Literally" is often used when the subject is metaphorical, but that's not the same thing as it meaning "metaphorically". If you took the "literally" away, it would still be understood to be metaphorical - the "literally" is intended to strengthen. It's the normal sense of literally, used hyperbolically.
In the same way, when someone says "you left me waiting for days" we don't say that "days" sometimes means tens of minutes.
>"Bricked" is relative, depending on your skill level.
>For some consumers, if recovery mode doesn't work that might be the end of line.
If you want to go by that rule, for a large number of people simply getting a virus would mean their computer is bricked. I think it's safe to assume "bricked" means it's a hardware level issue.
Usually it mean that device is not function anymore. Some time ago were very easy to brick phones while flashimg them. Its not hardware, it just complete mess in software.
>Usually it mean that device is not function anymore. Some time ago were very easy to brick phones while flashimg them. Its not hardware, it just complete mess in software.
Failing to make a back up of the software on a device which you're attempting to hack and subsequently destroying hardly seems relevant to an auto update locking you out. That's more like changing your password and forgetting it, or back in the day formatting your hard drive without a copy of XP to re-install. I don't know which phone you're referring to, but every phone I've rooted has been salvageable.
I guess I'd go with "bricked means the device is no longer usable, due to some problem the cause of which lies with the manufacturer", so most often devices are bricked because of hardware issues because manufacturer software issues are generally recoverable from.
Sure, but this is in the context of Macbook Pro's which can be fixed by someone with a bit of technical prowess, or literally anyone if you bring to to an Apple store. They're not locked down by hardware and unable to be restored like the Sonos smart speakers.
If I want to go to the nearest Apple store from my home, that's about 3 hours of travel time. Traveling 6 hours to fix a buggy update in the middle of social quarantine because of a pandemic it not something to look down upon.
Especially since countries other than mine have called out a complete lockdown. You can't just walk into an Apple store right now or call a techie friend over.
Chrome and Firefox, as well as Microsoft, have announced that they will only distribute stability fixes to prevent people working from home from having trouble.
In any normal year, I'd say "shit happens" (or "that's the risk of buying Apple", given that they don't even offer to do pickup of your >€2000 machine like most businesses selling laptops in that price range do). Right now, any disruption in computer performance is debilitating.
Apple needs to confirm these cases ASAP and/or pull the update for the devices affected. Apple isn't the only one releasing bricking updates by the way, Samsung has pulled an update for their A70 phone because of bricking issues two days ago.
The problem with this 'it is relative' line of logic is that everything can be relative. We need terms that describe stuff regardless of how people perceive it.
Otherwise, as you said, 'bricked' can mean almost anything. So what's the point of using a word without any particular meaning?
I've always had the impression that the difference between bricked and non-bricked is if it requires you to "fix" the hardware, it's considered bricked while if you can somehow fix it with just software, it's not bricked (yet?)
So flashing new firmware to fix the problem, not bricked.
Requiring soldering stuff and replacing hardware, it's bricked.
If the Apple store is open and not closed during a world-wide pandemic.
In this case, you can probably recover through the DFU mode and reinstalling Bridge OS. But this requires another Mac, which some people may not have, and at least some tech know-how.
The above thread about using DFU to recover a bricked MacBook confirms this: To HN experts, the device was bricked, until a new repair step was made known that could repair the issue (“unbrick it”).
>However, there are more advanced users that can access the storage via another system and fix it there, hook up via serial port or JTAG and flash new firmware, or even desolder and replace chips.
Not all people own more than one system.
If it was my only computer, and depend on it to do work and earn my living, and it broke, I would be terribly upset. Especially these days with the quarantine.
I agree. Back in the day I often installed custom ROMs on my Android phones and there was a distinction between needing to use recovery mode or losing your data vs "bricking", literally meaning that you turned your phone into a brick.
There were some "unbricking" guides but those usually required hardware voodoo, soldering, etc., things that most people couldn't do.
Now it's a clickbait term that has lost its original meaning of "you now own an expensive paper weight".
I remember the term being used at least as far back as the mid-80's. If you screwed up adding a second SID chip to your Commodore 64, the guides warned you about the potential for "bricking" the computer. Usually through static discharge.
It requires a separate, recent Mac, involves arcane combinations of specific ports, keys, and timings, relies on luck and voodoo, and ultimately may not even work.
On the one hand, I tend to agree with you. But on the other hand, I think there is a significant nuance - for many users going into recovery mode is beyond what they are comfortable doing with their laptop and so for all intents and purposes a laptop that can only be recovered that way is unrecoverable.
More generally, any issue with a computer can be fixed by a sufficiently skilled and determined user - maybe with some data loss. Even a broken firmware might be fixed by writing a new one, cracking the authentication mechanism, and building a custom rig to flash it to the chip.
It's all a matter of degrees and how much users can be expected to do which makes defining exactly what "bricked" means very difficult.
To be honest, even as an advanced user, I'm not comfortable with recovery modes on any operating system. They tend to be monolithic black boxes and that's a lot scarier than every other recovery method short of desoldering Macbook flash.
At least in the Android world, I've seen folks make the distinction between a "soft" or "hard" brick, with the former being fixable via a recovery mode or other software method, while the latter would require a hardware modification or may be truly bricked.
This is an unnecessary pedantic argument that is also wrong.
Bricking does not mean unrecoverable. That’s why the term unbricking exists.
It’s absolutely ok to call something that most regular users will be unable to fix on their own and in the meanwhile their device won’t even turn on “bricking”.
Originally, "the device is bricked" meant that the device was about as useful as a brick, i.e. it had no useful functionality left couldn't be recovered at all. However, as the parent points out, it's been increasingly misused.
FYI, Korean have literally the same expression used in the web "벽돌이 되다", not sure if it comes from the english web though.
Anyway, the "bricked" expression is more commonly used in smartphones and PlayStation Portable (PSP) than laptops. Then it makes more sense when considering the size of the devices.
> Anyway, the "bricked" expression is more commonly used in smartphones and PlayStation Portable (PSP) than laptops. Then it makes more sense when considering the size of the devices.
I think it's also at least in part more commonly applied to those types of devices because they're generally more locked down than a laptop, leading users to risk bricking by trying jailbreaking them. Installing a custom OS on most laptops just isn't nearly as risky in terms of bricking potential.
What everyone else said, but also, it's a particular kind of turned-into-a-brick: you can render something useless just by running a few hundred volts through it; "bricked" means that it's still functioning in some way, but because of a configuration problem it isn't listening to external input and never will again (because it also can't hear any input that might fix the configuration).
I started using this expression in 2006 when developing apps for flip-phones. It was common for the phones to fail to reliably receive app installation files and mid-way through the process, disconnect their serial ports from my development computer.
After that the phones would be, essentially, a brick.
I did not have the technology to fix it - a JTAG connector and software to drive a reinstallation of what I assumed was the firmware.
I classed bricked as something that need hardware intervention to make work again. Bit like having a bad bios flash and the only way to fix is to make a custom JTAG cable and serial transfer...effort. With that mostly bricked is a broken boot bios in many instances, maybe some other definitions, but most blur between bricked and broken and with that I'd class it broken over bricked if it needs hardware replaced.
Still bad that it's happening, but the term "bricked" is thrown around so flippantly these days. If a piece of tech is bricked, it's not recoverable at all.