My question is specific to Xiaomi devices and Nvidia Tegra SoC (and possibly Qualcomm SoC too). It hasn't happened to me personally, but from the extensive forum discussions on the Xiaomi support site, its apparent that some permanent damage is caused to the motherboard components (especially the eMMC) in at least two circumstances:
- When you try to change the partition table using parted or a similar utility.
- When you try to flash a ROM of a different device.
Now, I'm not saying that these are sensible things to do (at least the second one), but I don't see how any of them could actually lead to any hardware issues. What I want to know is, does this happen naturally because of the way handset/tablet motherboards are designed? Or does a chip maker deliberately cause the hardware to fail in this situation to have control over their device usage (the way they control by locking the bootloader or custom source-code apparently)?