My point was that RC in practice is pretty deterministic in the vast majority of cases, and I think equating its unpredictable rare cases with natural unpredict

My point was that RC in practice is pretty deterministic in the vast majority of cases, and I think equating its unpredictable rare cases with natural unpredictability of a GC is scaremongering. The differences between their non-deterministic behaviors are significant enough that they can't be simply equated with a sweeping generalization. This is true regardless of which approach has higher-throughput implementations or lower overhead overall, and completely unrelated to Apple's marketing, or Microsoft being first at something.