I don’t think the iPhone 7, iPad (6th generation), and iPod touch (7th generation) will lose support. If the iPhone 7 were to lose support for its 2 GB of RAM despite having an A10 chip, the iPhone 8 should lose support as well. And the iPod touch (7th gen) has the same A10 chip and 2 GB RAM as the iPhone 7, so I’d expect it to lose support at the same time as the iPhone 7 (I’m thinking they would in iOS 18), unless Apple decides to pull an iPod touch (4th gen) getting iOS 6 while the original iPad with the same A4 chip and 256 MB of RAM didn’t.
If iOS 16 drops support for devices, I expect those to only be A8/A8X and A9 devices with 2 GB of RAM. These include:
- iPad Air 2
- iPad mini 4
- iPhone 6s / 6s Plus
- iPhone SE (1st generation)
- iPad Pro 9.7-inch (1st generation)?
- iPad (5th generation)
I’m not exactly counting on the 9.7-inch losing support, but the original 12.9-inch iPad Pro should stay due to having double the RAM of the devices I just listed.
The iPad mini 4 came out in 2015 and it has the A8 SoC, which came out in 2014. The iPad Air 2 has an A8X, so I would expect the iPad mini 4 to lose support
earlier if not at the same time.
I agree that the mini 4 is a little slow on iOS 15, but I don’t think it’s as unbearable as you make it out to be. Mine is on 15.0 (I plan to keep it there so I can jailbreak it later) so maybe being on an earlier version makes it faster?