Bricked iPhone 16 Can Be Restored Wirelessly Using Another iPhone

The latest AirPods have usb-c, with the higher tier also including wireless charging. If there was ever a device category to remove usb-c it would be AirPods (which would still be a terrible idea)

I would argue the opposite: AirPods are a pure "client" device — they need to be connected to by something, they don't connect to something; and they have no display, input method, or other means to initiate/change Bluetooth pairing, if the state of the firmware somehow gets in a mucked-up state and they need to be flashed. The only possible way to recover broken AirPods is via tethered recovery.

An iPhone is the opposite: both a "client" and a "host", with plenty of options (in theory) for interactively initiating and configuring a wireless recovery boot. Almost capable enough (again, in theory) to be used for standalone debugging of its own hardware faults (like you'd do with a PC using a live USB image.) For 99% of faults, an iPhone should be capable of non-tethered recovery — if Apple would just write the firmware so as to enable that.

And the other 1% of the time, you've probably got at least one failed critical hardware component preventing early boot. At which point "flashing the OS" would be the least of your concern; and instead, you'd just take the thing into the Genius Bar, and they'd open it up, and then either tap into an interior debugging interface (as presumably they'll leave the lightning debug pins exposed as something like JTAG pads); or they'd temporarily swap the mainboard out into an "everything but the mainboard" recovery harness, flash it there, and then stick it back into the phone. At which point they could then use the recovered base firmware's recovery mode to QC the rest of the hardware!

this is the sort of functionality that only appears when the pain in the retail is felt by the corp. though can't say I think it's a good idea though.. feels like a free rein for state level adversaries...

Imagine the ramifications of this. I’m not a technician for any secret agents but I can see how this will make black hat attendees very excited.

Assuming it's implemented properly, that is. The whole reason Jailbreaks exist is due to bugs in Apple's implementations.