No, not really
1. No one is being asked to 'crowdfund' development. The first cars, gramophones, transistor radios, VCRs all cost a bleedin fortune and there weren't many who could afford them. But they sold, and became numerous, and economies of production scale and competition kicked in, and one day everybody had one. That the first foldyfones cost a lot is not remotely new or surprising, and it's not part of any new business model, and it doesn't need daft references to crowdfunding thrown in. There's nothing new about this approach: indeed, it's the only one available.
2. Fancy gadgets will continue to be 'fetishised' because they always have been. Again, look at the examples above. There was a time when you boasted about having a cassette recorder. (For some reason I still have my Sony TC-55, c.1976, then billed as the world's smallest cassette recorder. Weird.) Modern phones are no different from previous and future human practice, they are just more visibly ubiquitous. People will soon be considering, as they always have, according to their credit rating, whether to buy the cheaper, plainer version, the mainstream workhorse or the fancy, glossy, super-expensive status symbol. They did it with cars and TVs and will do it with foldyfones in due course.
The phone industry has languished in a severe lack of innovation ever since every lemming on Earth deicded to copy Apple's all-screen candybar. It is good to some true innovation return. But the innovation is in the form factor and engineering, not in anything else. The business model, pricing and marketing will all follow a time-honoured route established since the Model T. Hyping about the end of 'fetishisation', or imagining that a new design presages some game-changing business model completely misses the point. Perhaps the author of the article is very, very young?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
