Why do some devices get permanently bricked? Since no hardware is getting damaged while fiddling with the software, doesn’t it stand to reason that it can simply be fixed by reverting back to its original state?
In: Technology
There is a layer between hardware and software called firmware; this has to do with low-level operations that get hard-coded onto a small chipset (previously the BIOS, now there’s a new format that I can never remember) that does what’s called “bootstrapping” (that is, preparing the processor to load and read data for the operating system from a 0-power system.
Internally, at a hardware level, this fundamentally changes and alters some pathways, and so if you lose, say, the “turn on the display” pathway due to a botched firmware update, it’s really really difficult to get that fixed.
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