I love the part about AssistiveTouch. I was just in China last week and also noticed this and couldn't explain it. I thought it had something to do with Chinese writing/characters. But this makes more sense: "why don’t they click the home button? Because of a widespread misconception that the home button will wear out, thus reducing the resale value of the iPhone."
The irony is that if nobody uses the home button, the buyer of the used phone shouldn't care if it works or not either.
Of course psychology and human nature doesn't work that way (I too feel weird buying something when a feature I don't need is broken), but it's still funny.
> misconception that the home button will wear out
I don't think it's a misconception at all. I've had to use the AssistiveTouch solution with both my 2 previous iPhones because either the home or power button stopped working. It's still enabled on my current iPhone and I still use it out of habit. I don't resell my phones, so I'm not worried about that aspect of things. I've only had 3 iPhones, 2 of them had the issue and I feel my current hasn't gotten it because I still use AssistiveTouch.
I've seen a lot of people use AssistiveTouch as a replacement for the home button too. It's definitely because they want to reduce wear on the home button and is also an easily copied habit from one person to another.
I'm also guessing that the amount of dust in certain geographies may play a bigger part in the home buttons not working well after sometime, since there is a gap for dust to get in in all the iPhone models (AFAIK) till the iPhone 6s series. The iPhone 7 series is the first one to eliminate the press button and replace it with a haptic one, which helps in water resistance and also eliminates dust getting in at that point.
> widespread misconception that the home button will wear out
I don't know if Apple finally fixed that in the iPhone 6, but it was everything but a misconception, I had the problem in my iPhone 3G and iPhone 4s my girlfriend in her 5s. Many friends in different versions of the iPhone.
Yes, a lot of people use it for this reason. It's really weird. I use the hell out of these things and never had the home button do anything but its job.
It is downright weird how everyone frets about the resale value of Apple products. Almost like they treat them more like art or similar than a device to use to get their life done.
It's not weird at all if you live somewhere where an iPhone is important for status and very expensive. You want every penny back you can get when buying the next one
