GP said the device was "bricked", so I'm not sure whether that feature would work. "bricked" to me would imply BIOS is broken (otherwise it's not really bricked because you can reinstall the OS). The feature on various gaming motherboards involves you copying the BIOS file on a formatted USB, plugging it into the motherboard, and pressing a button (on the motherboard itself). This works even if the current BIOS is broken/corrupt.

That's correct: the BIOS was corrupt; the machine had no display at all, so no way to enter the BIOS menu or "boot" an OS.

Other Lenovo laptops have a recovery mode (Fn+R) where some bootstrapping firmware would flash a BIOS from USB, they neglected to include that feature in the (presumably lower cost) Flex lineup.

Some folks out of support went as far as desoldering the EPROM with the BIOS and hooking it up to a flash programmer, to get the laptop unbricked.

I realize they have a lot of different models and probably a limited test matrix, but it's still unforgivable to push a forced update that bricks the device to this level (and until that happened I didn't even know OEMs can push BIOS updates over Windows Update, probably because most of my machines are custom builds).

> I realize they have a lot of different models and probably a limited test matrix

Why would that be hard? They're the manufacturer; all they have to do is keep a handful of every model they've made, stick them in a room connected to network and power, and have Jenkins run a job on them that flashes the firmware and reboots. I know I'm oversimplifying, but I don't think I'm oversimplifying by that much, and it shouldn't be hard for the manufacturer to keep test units of their own hardware on hand.

There could be something immutable that boots the BIOS that also checks for things to flash the BIOS with.