Not a brick if you have to replace a storage device. Is it a brick if you have to replace a motherboard? Would replacing a motherboard not have fixed your xbox? (Surely the commercial availability of a part isn't the deciding factor in whether something is a brick, right?)
Commercial availability of a part is absolutely a factor in deciding whether something is a brick! I.e. some large expensive machine is bricked because the manufacturer refuses to sell you a small proprietary part without which the machine is entirely non-functional.
It’s a fairly frequent pattern where an IoT device becomes a brick because an API shuts down. Similarly, if you can’t replace a crucial part because the manufacturer won’t sell it to you, that would brick a device. If the device is cheaper to replace than to repair, then it is bricked (the Xbox).
A brick must be entirely non-functional and simply not worth repairing. It’s supposed to be a less vulgar version of FUBAR.
There are rare stories of extraordinary lengths that a maker will go to (such as fabbing your own custom parts, or standing up a private version of an API and DNS hijacking requests from the device in order to make it function again) in order to “un-brick” a device. The defining trait of these stories is that something new is invented in order to make the device function again.
I guess we have fundamentally different definitions of "bricked", then. I'm always going to define brick by the type of damage. It's not like a car being totaled, where even cosmetic damage can total a car when its value is low enough.
