The second code example ("if you were doing this before ARC") is completely wrong. "alloc" is a class method that allocates memory for an instance, on which "init" is then called. Calling it on an instance returned by a factory method is nonsensical.

The error is made consistently all three times, so it's clear that the author is genuinely confused about Objective-C. Maybe he's better at Swift, but it doesn't look good.