One more thing about static cells: they only work in UITableViewController. Even though Interface Builder will let you add them to a Table View object inside a regular UIViewController, this won’t work during runtime. The reason for this is that UITableViewController provides some extra magic to take care of the data source for the static cells. Xcode even prevents you from compiling such a project with the error message: “Illegal Configuration: Static table views are only valid when embedded in UITableViewController instances”.