We're talking past each other. There's "Automatic reference counting, the dynamic garbage collection algorithm that runs periodically at runtime during your pr

We're talking past each other. There's "Automatic reference counting, the dynamic garbage collection algorithm that runs periodically at runtime during your program's execution", and "Automatic reference counting, the static compile-time feature that ships in iOS5." These two things unfortunately share a name, but absolutely nothing else. The iOS 5 feature is not, and has no relationship to, and does nothing remotely like, the garbage collection algorithm with the same name.