Strong vs Weak storage

When you declare that a property should be strong, you are saying that "keep this object in the heap as long as I point to it strongly". When you use the weak storage, you are saying that "keep this object in the heap as long as someone else points to it strongly".

A good example is the parent-child scenario. Let's say that you have a UILabel on a blank scene. The scene (or the view) has a strong pointer to the UILabel and the UILabel has a weak pointer to the scene. Because of the strong pointer from the view to the label, as long as the view is alive, the label is alive. If you switch scenes, the previous scene will be deallocated and since the view is no longer alive, the label is also deallocated.

If there is a parent-child relationship where both the parent and the child has a strong pointer to the other, they will never be deallocated from the heap (because you said that both should be kept alive) and thus cause a memory leakage. You don't want that.

It's a good question, not a noob question at all. Hope this clears things up for you.