A Closer Look at Table View Cells
If a cell object is reusable—the typical case—you assign it a reuse identifier (an arbitrary string) in the storyboard. At runtime, the table view stores cell objects in an internal queue. When the table view asks the data source to configure a cell object for display, the data source can access the queued object by sending a dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier: message to the table view, passing in a reuse identifier. The data source sets the content of the cell and any special properties before returning it. This reuse of cell objects is a performance enhancement because it eliminates the overhead of cell creation.