Hello,  I know it's a bit off-topic, but I just bricked my iPhone somehow. My iPhone 5SE was working just perfectly the night before, and I did NOT consent/was asked to do any iOS updates. Shortly after I woke up, my phone got into a boot loop--that is, where the iPhone turns on, displays the white screen and Apple logo, turns off and repeats.
 I borrowed someone Windows box, because I don't run one myself, and hooked it up to the computer and opened it in iTunes. So apparently, it tried to do an update, but then got an error 6 (I believe) for "unknown error", which, according to Apple support pages, has something to do with the USB connection. I got a cable I know is from Apple and is in good condition, tried it with a 3rd party cable, and tried it with another good-condition cable that looks like it is from Apple, and have gotten the same results.
 I could try doing a "restore" which resets it to factory defaults, but then I would lose my messages and photos. I was a genius and thought I would improve my privacy by not giving my photos to iCloud or Google Photos, which I may now regret. I tried seeing if I could fetch my messages from Verizon, but no luck. I did find out that there's a web interface for texting people from your phone number on Verizon's website, which was pretty cool.

Hello,

 I know it's a bit off-topic, but I just bricked my iPhone somehow. My iPhone 5SE was working just perfectly the night before, and I did NOT consent/was asked to do any iOS updates. Shortly after I woke up, my phone got into a boot loop--that is, where the iPhone turns on, displays the white screen and Apple logo, turns off and repeats.

 I borrowed someone Windows box, because I don't run one myself, and hooked it up to the computer and opened it in iTunes. So apparently, it tried to do an update, but then got an error 6 (I believe) for "unknown error", which, according to Apple support pages, has something to do with the USB connection. I got a cable I know is from Apple and is in good condition, tried it with a 3rd party cable, and tried it with another good-condition cable that looks like it is from Apple, and have gotten the same results.

 I could try doing a "restore" which resets it to factory defaults, but then I would lose my messages and photos. I was a genius and thought I would improve my privacy by not giving my photos to iCloud or Google Photos, which I may now regret. I tried seeing if I could fetch my messages from Verizon, but no luck. I did find out that there's a web interface for texting people from your phone number on Verizon's website, which was pretty cool.

 I have some irreplaceable images on my phone, so I'm trying to see if I can pull data from it. I'm trying to burn a Windows 10 image onto a flash drive, but I don't really want to override my Ubuntu install images on the current flash drives I have, so it's an interesting mess. I plan to install Windows 10 onto a brand-new SSD that I didn't intend on using for a couple of months, for when I unbox my gaming desktop when I move, so that I could have a fresh Windows 10 image and a fresh copy of iTunes to run on the computer.

 I really think the iOS operating system/kernel/firmware was poorly written and designed. If I am not mistaken, when a Linux box is started, it reads its stuff from the storage device (i.e. hard drive), and slaps everything onto RAM and runs itself from RAM. When the kernel is updated, it writes the new kernel alongside the existing kernel on the storage device, so that if the system is abruptly restarted mid-process, it will run the fully functional old kernel. Once the new kernel is fully written, it finalizes it by rewriting the startup process on the storage device to run the new kernel instead of the old kernel, which if I theorize correctly, could be as simple as changing one binary bit. Once that is done, it can delete the old kernel on the storage device and/or update the kernel that is running on the RAM.

 It pains me that Windows and Apple don't do this, and you have to have your device nonoperational while you stare at the updating screen, when the system could have just updated already, and could be started up at normal speeds. I am grateful there is a Linux option.

Anyways, got any ideas?

Thanks,

Eli D.