I agree with the potential in those 3 things, but consider... Saving even an hour writing something as a few terse lines means nothing if in 6 months you need

I agree with the potential in those 3 things, but consider... Saving even an hour writing something as a few terse lines means nothing if in 6 months you need days to decipher and debug it. The code has to remain clear somehow. About the only acceptable use of a clever one-liner is when it provably reduces the runtime of the generated machine code by a significant amount...and even then, the hour you saved not writing code had better be spent writing a block of comments to explain your one-liner. Yes, Objective-C is weird. But put yourself in the seat of a language parser; it's already a very difficult problem to ensure that some languages parse correctly and unambiguously. If you introduce new syntax that is "weird", it's actually safer than doing something that may cause subtle incompatibilities with all the code that's been compiled a certain way for decades. And that code has proven the "weird" language is practical, whereas a brand new language (no matter how perfectly designed it seems to be) may actually have parser corner cases that have not been ironed out yet. Garbage collection is a benefit in many situations, but Apple has managed to create a very responsive phone where mere milliseconds are just perceptible enough to make a user think "my iPhone feels fast, and this other phone feels slow". Right now, performance matters most, and manual memory management is an edge for Apple. It's important to make programmers happy, but not as important as it is to sell things to users.