I was on vacation and got a notification that there was a firmware update for my Model 3 which was parked in my garage a thousand miles away. I remotely installed it and my car literally got 5% quicker.
No, it’s like buying an 1 GHz oscilloscope and buying the license to enable the 2 GHz version. The hardware has always been there.
The test equipment industry is notorious for this. I can buy a $15k Keysight Fieldfox spectrum analyzer and turn it into a $50k instrument with license that enable hardware that is already there.
It is a real case of downloading more RAM.