Those aren't Objective-C objects, but I get your point. ARC does not relieve you of thinking about memory, it just makes it easier.

ARC to me is scary... I got over the huge learning curve, and the nuances of autoreleasing, and retaining, and it seems like now I gotta unlearn all of that??? And not to mention some third party libraries/source code don't support ARC. To me, I'm gonna hold off using ARC as long as possible.

Well, you don't have to "unlearn" it. It's actually a good thing you went through the "pain" of learning it pre-ARC because if you understand how reference counting actually works, you will be able to make better and more informed decisions on the management of your objects in 5.0+ with ARC (e.g. when to use strong vs. weak properties). There's nothing magical about it, and Ray Wanderlich has a fantastic ARC tutorial that helped me greatly: http://www.raywenderlich.com/5677/beginning-arc-in-ios-5-par...

Holding off on ARC is only advantageous if you need to support iOS versions before 5.0, but ARC is the future of iOS.

Well, same goes for every non memory managed object in any language.

Like, SWT objects in Java. Or file descriptors. Or DB connections.

Indeed, as Aaron above mentioned, ARC doesn't absolve the programmer of the responsibility of proper memory management, it's just less overhead to have to worry about.