In traditional computers, software issues can always be solved. In the worst case, supposing that there's no hardware damage, one can always go there and format the partition where the system is installed, reinstall everything and make things right.

Now in mobile devices people like to say that sometimes "there's no way to solve the issue". People usually talk about a device being "permanently bricked", and say that "no matter what there will be no way to correct it".

But wait a minute, let's talk about Android for simplicity. Android is based on Linux. So in the end of the day, as far as I know, the Android system is just one specific Linux distro tailored for mobile devices, with the pertinent virtual machine installed to run the apps.

How can a *software problem* caused on the device, be permanent? How can a *software problem* have no way to be corrected, if it is just a Linux system in the end of the day?

As I said, I've never seen anyone saying "this computer cannot be fixed, we need to throw it away and buy another one" by a software issue. This *might* happen, for hardware issues, because sometimes the price to buy the hardware pieces needed might not be a huge advantage over buying a new computer.

But for software, no one throws a computer aways, we always correct it.

In that case, why concerning mobile devices, people talk about "permanently bricked" devices and "software problems that cannot be solved" and that might cause the device to be discarded? How can software problems on mobile devices be "unsolvable"?