Seems like they conflated 32-bit with lack of memory protection. (Tangent: IIRC there were Macs where the CPU had a 32 bit pointer width but you could only use

Seems like they conflated 32-bit with lack of memory protection. (Tangent: IIRC there were Macs where the CPU had a 32 bit pointer width but you could only use 24 bits of address space. And sometimes software would work on this assumption and break with a full 32 bits. But that's neither here nor there.) But in addition to lack of memory protection, cooperative multi-tasking was also a big problem. It was a pretty common experience to see something do intense work rendering a progress bar and the rest of the system would slow down. IIRC this made having something like a web browser open sometimes painful.