This makes sense if you want to design UIView based list cells (i.e. UITableView Cells) that have to be high performant because you can do some - (id) init magi

This makes sense if you want to design UIView based list cells (i.e. UITableView Cells) that have to be high performant because you can do some - (id) init magic that is slower in awakeFromNib and you save some allocation calls. I had to do something similar for a Mac app where i effectively rewrote a finished NSView completely in code and gained at least a 30% speed gain afterwards.