> You should typically not manage scarce resources such as file descriptors, network connections, and buffers or caches in a dealloc method. In particular, you should not design classes so that dealloc will be invoked when you think it will be invoked.

Do they propose an alternative mechanism to handling resources other than reference counting? As you state, RAII breaths life into c++, given how well it works for all types of resources.

It sounds like the above statement is possibly being made in anticipation of the introduction of garbage collection, which would make piggybacking resource destruction non-deterministic. Whereas, it could also be interpreted as a very strong reason to favor manual (maybe automatic) reference counting, and eschew GC entirely. I don't know objective-c very well, but I wonder if the use of GC has generated these arguments against it from within the OSX developer community.