A big reason why some people stayed on 32-bit was that 64 bit consumes more memory while providing not much useful in return when your address space doesn't exc

A big reason why some people stayed on 32-bit was that 64 bit consumes more memory while providing not much useful in return when your address space doesn't exceed 4GB. In an era when you rarely had machines with this much RAM, 32 bit computing is a perfectly rational choice to maximise the amount of memory available.