"Does the hardware physically work" isn't ever really the question under consideration, though, for better or worse. For Macs specifically, it is going to get increasingly difficult to even test things in the coming years. Mac x86 builds are by far the flakiest on GitHub in my experience, there's no expanding capacity, only refurbished machines 6 years out, and the number of users is dwindling, not to mention the enormous performance gap. So what do you do? When we last asked about it in a project I work on a few users expressed interest, so we kept it, but that isn't forever. The JDK as a project probably has a different risk profile than most other projects too so the cost of keeping around that code can be relatively high.

Not saying it is always good, in fact I would say there is rarely a "good" happy outcome in these cases, just trying to give the alternative perspective when you have to make these calls.

The writing has been on the wall for the last 7 years and the LTS of JDK 25 goes until 2030, 11 years from the point Apple announced their intentions. Java for Mac apps or native Java backend development has always been niche as well. For Java development for Linux hosting, you still have a path forwards beyond 2030 with virtualization. How's your SPARC dev machine holding up?

> I don't like I'm pushed to migrate only because the software wants that, otherwise the hardware works with no problem.

This is one of the problems with the switch from shrink-wrap software to always-upgrading software. Customers feel like they bought a thing so it should work forever but what they are really asking is that new software be continually written for the hardware they bought years ago.

If you want to run your old hardware with your old software forever, you can. But of course in a connected world where a million malicious parties are trying to take over your system, this is probably a bad decision, and that’s where the tension arises.

That's just how things go. But, existing Oracle JDK versions will continue to work, and openjdk might continue to support osx/amd64 as a target.. so I wouldn't worry too much about this.

> the hardware works with no problem

In the same way that PowerPC and m68k hardware still works, sure. Apple silicon is so performant that (much like those previous two hardware jumps) it's not worth maintaining support for the old arch at this point.

Java 25 is an LTS, I guess you can use that for a couple of years still. But at some point of time, macOS will be too old and all kinds of software will no longer install.

Can you run Linux?

My mid 2012 air had trouble with os x about 10 years ago. I moved to nixos and haven't had any issues since.