Factory is actually perfect example of pattern that is mostly used to overcome the fact that passing classes around is unnecessarily complex in Java and thus it

Factory is actually perfect example of pattern that is mostly used to overcome the fact that passing classes around is unnecessarily complex in Java and thus it's favorable to wrap code calling constructor in it's own class and pass instances of it. In "dynamic" languages (including ObjC) you can simply use use the class object (and if the need arises: things that behave like class objects) itself instead of factory in most cases.