While we can acknowledge that the more expansive definition of "garbage collection" includes ARC, we can still simultaneously hold another definition of "gc" to not include ARC when discussing Apple & Swift. That's the way Apple documentation and most others are using that term.

Apple docs:

"Garbage collection is deprecated in OS X Mountain Lion v10.8, and will be removed in a future version of OS X. Automatic Reference Counting is the recommended replacement technology."[1]

[1]https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/releasenotes/objecti...

[2]http://lists.apple.com/archives/objc-language/2011/Jun/msg00...

If we don't use the more common understanding of gc, Apple's documentation doesn't make sense. If we do a substitution of Apple's verbage using ARC==GC, we get nonsense such as:

"Garbage collection (which includes ARC) is deprecated in OS X Mountain Lion v10.8, and will be removed in a future version of OS X. Automatic Reference Counting (which is also part of garbage collection) is the recommended replacement technology."

With the insistence on ARC==GC, we'd have to parse that sentence as garbage collection is being removed and replaced with garbage collection.