I don't know what current case law is but I think that ought to be explicitly illegal. A physical product should be required to maintain the features that it had when it was purchased. Anything else is clearly cheating the consumer.
Even if you have the ability to remotely enable new features:
1. You shouldn’t use the same ability to disable existing features.
2. You shouldn’t enable them, either! It should be opt-in. Any kind of change has the potential to break something. Just don’t be changing my hardware without me initiating the change.
> Just don’t be changing my hardware without me initiating the change
In this case it seems to have been disabled in future firmware, so "you" did initiate the change, as you did an firmware upgrade that included the change. Still, shitty to sneak it in, I agree, but the feature wouldn't literally be there one day then not the next, requires human initiation at least.