Brick

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The term "bricked" refers to nonfunctional device states. Though nominally meaning that the device is permanently damaged, in practice it includes conditions which range from trivially recoverable (a failed update) to completely unrecoverable (in certain cases involving damaged baseband memory). A phone may be referred to as "bricked" if it will not boot, will not respond to input, will not make calls, etc. Early unlock solutions frequently resulted in partially-bricked phones after firmware updates were applied. Generally speaking, the iPhone is quite difficult to brick permanently via software, and in almost all cases the damage can be reversed.

Irreversible Software Bricking

There are two ways to irreversibly brick your iDevice in software is to flash an invalid baseband bootloader, provided it has a baseband. All other bad flash scenarios are recoverable some way or another. It is impossible to brick your device simply by jailbreaking it, since DFU Mode will still be available to recover from a bad flash.

If you purposefully erase / zero out your NOR, then you will even have trouble doing a DFU restore because important information from the SysCfg section will not be available.

Another way is using software called Black0ut, It's still in development put should be released to the public soon. The software goes for a custom firmware approach with the aid of the limera1n exploit, so if you have an A-5 device it may become a more lengthy process but not impossible. The software developed by The Br3ak-T33m, Exploits by some of there members, pod2g and geohot.