I don't know about NSOrderedSet, but for number properties on Core Data objects, you can avoid NSNumber entirely by using primitives. There is an option when ge

I don't know about NSOrderedSet, but for number properties on Core Data objects, you can avoid NSNumber entirely by using primitives. There is an option when generating model objects in Xcode to use primitives, which will do so for you. Properties may be a mix of primitives and objects, too. E.g. if I have a "Car" model that has "tankSize" and "milesPerGallon", I could have "tankSize" be a 32-bit int represented by a int32_t, and "milesPerGallon" a 32-bit int represented by a NSNumber*. I'm using CoreData via Swift and find it mostly more enjoyable than Objective-C.