Your comment is so naive. Most products out there have a terms and conditions that equate to 'the company can change the product at any time and you're always free to stop using it', while giving their salespeople little to no idea about future progress because that would limit sales. Even if you didn't "maybe forgot to ask", there isn't anyone to respond with the truth.
If you purchase a product that doesn't have ads and then they introduce ads - that is a huge change in the value proposition of the product.
> that is a huge change in the value proposition of the product.
It is, but one that is already calculated at time of purchase. You'd pay a lot more if there were strict guarantees that it would never display ads.
The Belarus tractor company learned that lesson. Once upon a time they tried to infiltrate western agriculture with, under the backing of the USSR, heavily subsidized products offered on the cheap. But farmers saw through the thin veneer and realized that they wouldn't be able to get parts for the machines down the road. As such, the much cheaper price wasn't a winner. Farmers were willing to pay significantly more to American companies, knowing that they would provide not just on day one but also long into the future. The economic lesson learned was that the marketplace doesn't value just initial purchase price, but the full value proposition over its entire lifetime.
Many people are willing to gamble, of course, especially for "disposable" things.
I read it as more rhetorical than not. No one was literally expected to ask about the future. However, one could be expected to ask oneself “what could such a low price tag on such capable hardware mean for the future?”
It is unrealistic, of course, because it is a textbook case of information asymmetry (the enemy of the market)—only a vanishingly small number of people can adequately assess the pricing, having to know enough about hardware and all the various forces that could bring it down, like potential upcoming lineup changes or inventory overflow.
The right move is to fight information asymmetry. Many developed countries, including the US, already do it in countless cases. A mild way could be requiring to disclose things like this in addition to the ToS; a more thorough way could be simply banning this business model.
If you purchase a product that doesn't have ads and then they introduce ads - that is a huge change in the value proposition of the product.