[cdonnellytx]

Which is what makes it even worse: it's not that they can't do it on the iPhone, it's that they won't.

And why not? It can't be a question of RAM: Java has had GC back when the average home computer had half the memory available in the first gen iPhone. Nor can it be efficiency: most GCs these days are efficient enough for the average program, and a developer can always disable it if she prefers manual memory allocation.

My point is that it just ends up being yet another example of Apple making arbitrary restrictions that do little for performance or user experience, while causing a lot of pain for developers.

[Zev]

The Newton had a garbage collector with NewtonScript. And the Newton only had something like 640kB of RAM.

Although, I don't think the decision to leave it out was arbitrary or solely to piss off developers. Apple likely wants to have as little code duplication as possible, so they're not going to add it in until the iPhone/iPad has enough ram free so that game developers don't have to worry about when the GC will run. My guess (and lots of emphasis on guess) is that this will happen when support for the iPhone 3G is dropped.