Yes, all of those are in the realm of possibilities, but has it ever been the norm?

In my experience, products like this are only get updates when the company finds a way to extract more money:

- add more ads

- add more ads that pretend not to be ads

- to remove functionality, so it won't cannibalize sales of more expensive product

It’s the norm because people rather buy one single product that does it all.

The alternative to an all-in-one sound bar is having regular 5.1 speakers, a nice receiver, a nice streaming box, and maybe a dumber TV and you will have absolutely the best setup but it’s a lot of putting pieces together, more space usage, and either money (if you want it right away) or a lot of waiting (if you want to get it used).

Even dedicated receivers have software updates now. My Onkyo receiver had an update that added Dolby Atmos support, for example.

I had a Yamaha that had a dtsx firmware addition upgrade after it shipped. Not sure if it wasnt ready at product ship, or some way to avoid licensing fees, but I dont know how they would track who upgraded as it wasnt network enabled.

Sennheiser Max has a full computer and os running inside, they can upgrade it quite a bit. Biggest limitation on the device is HDMI 2.0 preventing 20gbps video passthrough of hdmi 2.1, however they should be able to add new audio codecs.

I actually picked up a Samsung soundbar for my mom this past Christmas and there were quite a few negative reviews. Usually around the soundbar dropping its connection. However diving deeper on them seems to revealed that the issue was resolved with an update. It's not super smart though and needs a USB drive or phone app to update. So it has prevented this situation from happening.

Considering the soundbar connects to a TV, console, phone, etc that are constantly releasing new versions and upgrades it makes sense to build in the function to something as simple as a soundbar to fix bugs and compatibility issues.

Samsung doesn't have the greatest track record with updates though so obviously you don't want to jump the gun on these. Hopefully not a Galaxy Watch 4 situation where they need to be mailed to Samsung to be reset because they didn't think about this during the design phase.

More hardware is sold at cost or at a loss, compensated with ads. I don't like the model either, but that's how it is.

If price isn't the only factor for some, it is for many who would otherwise not buy these things. Sellers picked up on that long ago.

Other comments wish to see regulations, they can't outwit those marketing tricksters. For profit enterprise can, and will offer more alternatives with bigger stamps about privacy, ad-less certified and whatnot.