this is one good reason to use Obj-C instead of Swift: to support older iOS devices that cannot upgrade to iOS 7.

Not all that good a reason. 95% of active iOS users are already on iOS 7+ and that number is growing every day. The only devices that can't upgrade to it are the iPhone 3GS and below, the equivalent iPod touch, and the first generation iPad. There aren't many people using these devices any more.

I have an iPad 1 that is stuck at iOS 5.1.

I appreciate that it's frustrating being left behind, but when only 0.66% of active iOS users are on version 5, it's very difficult to justify the extra work involved in supporting them.

By the time the OP learns to develop for iOS and actually builds his application, the number of people using older versions of iOS will be even lower. Unless you're willing to chase diminishing returns, it's not worth supporting anything beyond the previous major version, and even that's debatable.

Remember how long it took to lay Carbon to rest.

Very different situation. I work with a lot of companies that develop iOS applications, and it's extremely rare for them to be more than a couple of years behind the cutting edge.

Then take a look back at all the new programming languages and frameworks Apple has introduced over the years and then shot in the head.

Modern Apple does it very infrequently, and usually, when they do, it's because they've got something newer to replace it. In this case, Swift is the newer thing.

No, you're right, there's no rule against supporting older versions. Xcode 6, which is the version released just the other day to support iOS 8 development, supports building applications targeting iOS 6 and up.

Apple have never explicitly required developers to support a minimum version of iOS, they just drop support for targeting older versions in Xcode a few years after release. Xcode 5, which was the most recent version until the other day, still supported iOS 4.3, which is over three years old and has virtually nobody using it.

It's technically possible to write an iOS application in nothing but C, but it's deeply unpleasant compared with using the right tool for the job. Just learn Objective-C. There's very little more to the language than plain C, but it makes things so much easier. Then, when you're familiar with the platform, pick up Swift. It's by far the better language, but it's a bigger change than C to Objective-C and it's still pretty immature.

One of the worst parts is all the retain and release calls.

OP says he's familiar with C, so he's already used to manual memory management.

Regardless, modern Objective-C uses ARC, which means all the retain and release calls are automatically generated by the compiler. You actually get a compiler error if you try to write the calls yourself these days.

god help you if you forget because there's no obvious way to see the problem.

Aside from the fact that Apple provides excellent tools like Instruments and a static analyser which lets you track down problems like this easily, so long as you understand one single principle, it's very difficult to go wrong with manual memory management on Apple platforms.

NARC. If a method begins with new, alloc, retain, or copy, then you own it and it's your responsibility to release it. Otherwise, you don't need to.

The only people who struggle with memory management are the ones that don't understand this very simple rule. Learn that, and it's effortless.

My boss, who wrote all the Objective-C stuff, says that Objective-C has become a mess over the past 5-10 years as Apple is promoting Objective-C for both iOS (iPhone, iPad) and OSX (desktop) applications, which has caused all kinds of problems and bloat. I've had all kinds of problems with Objective-C, so I don't doubt his characterization of it.

To be frank, it sounds like none of you have more than a beginner understanding of the language. How can you not be aware of NARC or ARC? It's the kind of thing you learn on day one.

I'm going to try putting it in airplane mode when I go to bed tonight to see if that stops whatever is eating it.

Go to Settings > General > Usage > Battery Usage and it will tell you what's been using energy.

Using the gopro with 240 fps on the gopro app on a Galaxy S4 is a nightmare and I envision that it will be the same on the iPhone.

Seems to be okay to me.

If the men have a significant response rate, then just maybe that means the problem is YOUR QUESTION IS TOO VAGUE, rather than both genders experiencing sexual issues.

Wow, how unscientific can you get? You've decided on what you want the result to be and you're discarding data that doesn't fit.

Sexual assault is really, really common. It's not just another word for rape, it covers any unwanted sexual touching. I had a woman I didn't know grope me as I was leaving a club last week. That's sexual assault. You may think that it's harmless - I wasn't particularly bothered by it - but regardless of severity, it's still sexual assault.

Apple has so many sweetheart deals with the US gov that it's not funny, mostly in the area of non-compliance with tax code or outright tax evasion.

Can you substantiate this? Every time somebody has said this to me and they've gone into specifics, it's been bullshit.

Just the fact that Apple is allowed to flaunt the anti-trust laws is a good example of why Apple (and shareholders) benefit from spying.

Same here. Which anti-trust laws? Be specific.

I don't believe a fucking word. They'd throw a baby off a bridge for a $2 bump in their stock price.

How would providing data to the USA government raise their stock prices? If anything, it would lower them.

You don't really have to trust Apple to do the right thing here. If - as you say - they are only motivated by profit, then look at what is more profitable for them. Their business model doesn't depend on access to their customers' personal data and habits. Google, on the other hand, makes use of their users' personal data and habits, however benignly you choose to judge that.

Basically, privacy is a competitive advantage Apple have against their biggest rival in the mobile market. If you think they are only motivated by profit, then the reasonable conclusion is that they will act to preserve their customers' privacy rather than disclose it.

You're massively overreacting to a biased headline. What is meant by "Apple locks NFC to Apple Pay" is simply "Apple have only provided APIs for Apple Pay so far".

This is pretty standard practice with new Apple hardware features.

Bluetooth? Originally developers couldn't access that at all, only the higher-level gaming APIs used it.

Touch ID? Again, developers couldn't access that at all to begin with, but iOS was released yesterday and that introduced an API for developers to use it.

The camera? Originally developers could only tell the system that they wanted a photo. Now we've got fine-grained control over shutter speed, etc.

Apple have a habit of introducing hardware features then providing a third-party API after they've had a chance to see it deployed at a large scale. If you are a long-time iPhone user, you've seen them do this time and time again. The fact that there isn't an API for it on day one doesn't mean that they are trying to lock it away.

Apple haven't said that they will open-source Swift. The only thing they've said so far is that they've been concentrating on getting it to 1.0 first and haven't made a decision about open-sourcing it yet.

You can set a bit such that the phone will only download new purchases over wifi.

And how many users do you think knew that they needed to do this prior to the album being released?

FFS, I wish people would at least attempt to avail themselves of the facts before spouting off like this.

You don't have to switch off automatic downloads of new purchases over cellular connections because it's switched off by default.

Not really. GCC is inconvenient in several ways. See this comparison for details. Most of them are technical, but a couple are related to the license being GPL. Clang and LLVM are "truly free software" as well, so Apple clearly aren't averse to "truly free software".

Some has contributed a nontrivial amount of work to LLVM and especially the clang project.

To be clear: Apple aren't just a contributor, they created Clang and employ one of the LLVM project's founders to work on LLVM, Clang, and Swift.