Um. What? While, yes, it is more expensive to detect that something is a link than not, it isn't that expensive to do. Neither is drawing an attributed string with Core Text. Yes, its hard. No, it isn't nearly as hard as you're making it out to be.

And making things tappable/highlightable? The tableview isn't scrolling when you're tapping. Detecting a tap and performing some calculations to determine which text run the tap falls on cannot cause scrolling performance to go down.