What happens if an official update bricks your device and the warranty expired?
From wikipedia: "In one common sense of the term, "bricking" suggests that the damage, often a misconfiguration of essential on-board software, is so serious as to have rendered the device _permanently_ unusable."
What? Your CPU burnt during the last upgrade? Not bricked! You just need to go through the simple procedure of soldering a new CPU!
edit: I'll gladly take a downvote for this, you're talking about screaming at customer support and IM getting downvoted. Constructive group we have here.
My device has been stuck in a perpetual (failing) update loop like many others. No patch was ever released. There's no known way without specialized hardware (PS3Key) or out-of-warranty RMA. I don't want to invest in either solution.
Through much trial and error, I found a way to make the update work every time. This may look stupid, but I swear it works:
1. Try the update. It fails.
2. Turn off the console.
3. Take the hard drive out.
4. Turn on the console. It will fail to boot and shutdown.
5. Put the hard drive back in.
6. Turn on the console. The update will start again and succeed.
In my opinion, it's a poorly designed update mechanism that makes it prone to failure. There should be some redundancy built into the process so that the machine can always force itself back to a "known-good" state and at least access the recovery menu.
If you are able to apply an update yourself, your device is not bricked.
Though I was answering the related hypothetical question "What happens if an official update bricks your device and the warranty expired?".