The Axe Finally Dropped
I’ve been saying this for years, mostly to parents trying to save a buck on eBay, but it finally happened. The inevitable hardware purge has arrived for the Roblox crowd. If you’ve been clinging to that cracked iPad Mini 3 or an ancient iPod Touch 6th gen to keep the peace in the backseat of your car, I have bad news: the party is over.
Roblox has officially cut support for the A7 and A8 chip generation. That means the iPhone 5s, iPhone 6, 6 Plus, the 6th gen iPod Touch, and yes, the iPad Mini 3 are now effectively paperweights for gaming. And honestly? Good riddance.
I know, I know. It sounds harsh. Hardware is expensive, and in 2025, dropping three or four hundred bucks on a “budget” tablet just so a kid can play Adopt Me! feels like extortion. But I dusted off an old iPad Mini 3 from my junk drawer last night just to see what the experience was like right before the cutoff, and let me tell you—it wasn’t gaming. It was suffering.
The 1GB RAM Bottleneck
Here’s the technical reality that nobody likes to talk about when they’re browsing refurbished listings: RAM is the killer. It’s not the processor speed, really. It’s the memory.
The devices getting the boot—specifically the iPad Mini 3 and the iPod Touch 6—are running on 1GB of LPDDR3 RAM. In the context of late 2025, that is laughably insufficient. The Roblox engine has bloated significantly over the last few years. Between the layered clothing updates, the dynamic lighting engines, and the sheer asset density of modern experiences, 1GB simply cannot hold the game state in memory.
When I tried to load a simple obby on that Mini 3, the crash rate was 100%. Not 50%, not “sometimes.” Every single time the asset buffer filled up, the OS killed the app to save the kernel. That’s not a software bug; that’s physics. You can’t fit 2GB of textures into a 1GB bucket.
Why Now?
You might be wondering why they waited until the very end of 2025 to pull the plug. These devices are over a decade old. The iPad Mini 3 dropped in 2014. In tech years, that’s the Paleolithic era.
My guess? User base density. Roblox held on as long as they could because a massive chunk of their younger demographic plays on hand-me-down devices. The “parents’ old phone” demographic is huge. But maintaining support for the Metal API on A7/A8 chips probably became a development nightmare that was holding back features for everyone else. At some point, you have to stop optimizing for the lowest common denominator when that denominator is a phone from the Obama administration.
The iPod Touch Tragedy
The loss of the iPod Touch (6th gen) hits a specific niche of the community hard. For a long time, the Touch was the gateway drug for kids entering the mobile ecosystem. It was cheap, small, and didn’t require a data plan.
But let’s be real about the 6th gen. It was always a bit of a thermal disaster. It had the A8 chip (underclocked compared to the iPhone 6) but without the battery capacity to sustain it. Even if Roblox hadn’t killed support, the battery life on these aging units is likely measured in minutes, not hours. I remember trying to play on one of these back in 2018 and it got hot enough to uncomfortable in a pocket. In 2025? It’s a fire hazard.
What This Means for the Used Market
If you are a parent or a budget gamer, you need to scrub these devices from your “maybe” list immediately. I see listings on marketplaces every day: “iPad Mini 3 – Great for Kids Games!”
That is now a lie.
Do not buy an iPad Mini 3. Do not buy an iPhone 6 for gaming. If you’re looking for the absolute floor for Roblox entry right now, you need to be looking at devices with at least 2GB of RAM, and preferably 3GB or 4GB if you want it to last through 2026. The iPad Mini 4 is now the absolute bare minimum, and even that is on life support. If you can, stretch for the Mini 5. The A12 Bionic chip in the Mini 5 is still a beast and handles modern Roblox physics without breaking a sweat.
The “Planned Obsolescence” Argument
I’ve already seen the angry comments. “This is just forced obsolescence to make us buy new iPads!”
Look, I’m the first person to call out Apple or developers when they brick perfectly good hardware for no reason. I still use a 2015 MacBook Pro for typing because the keyboard is superior. But this isn’t that.
We are talking about mobile hardware that has survived 11+ years of software updates. That is unheard of in the Android world. If you tried to run modern Roblox on a Samsung Galaxy S5 (the iPhone 6 competitor), it would likely explode or just refuse to install the APK. The fact that these Apple devices ran the game at all until late 2025 is a miracle of optimization.
So, RIP to the iPad Mini 3 and the iPod Touch 6. You served us well. You entertained millions of kids in millions of backseats. But it’s time to go to the recycling center. The metaverse has moved on.
