Not too long ago, there were hardly any 64-bit hardware in the market for average users, until they flooded the market and now every other Ma and Pa owns a Windows running on 64-bit.
Desktop hardware has been 64-bit since the 2003 Athlon 64, 2004 Pentium 4 and 2003 PowerPC G5. Servers 10 years+ earlier(X). I guess 9+ years on the desktop is "not too long" if your beard is long enough :)
Software not so much though, 64b XP basically didn't exist, and for 7 I've no idea what the ratio is. And 64b on Windows is a complete fuck-up (even when running a 64b Windows), apple's "fat binaries" made the transition smooth as butter for most users (the only issue I ever had were a pair of kernel extensions), in 7 64b is still screwy and the vast majority of software available seem to remain 32b.
Obviously it's not representative of all users, but Steam breaks down its hardware survey by OS version. The 60% using Windows 7 64bit is a convincing majority.
64b on windows is a fuck-up? I haven't had a problem with 64/32-bit compatibility since windows 7 came out, other than devices that only have 32-bit drivers. And you'll have that problem anywhere - even Apple's marvel of engineering where you double the size of executables won't solve that.
Software shipping as 32-bit isn't a bad thing. It means it will run on more machines. Shipping a Windows application as 32-bit has NO negative consequences unless your application needs more than 2GB of available address space, with a couple rare exceptions like shipping device drivers or debugging tools.
Apple's "marvel of engineering" actually does. You can launch an app in 32-bit mode (while running in 64-bit mode) should you require interoperability with 32-bit components. All actually pretty neat. And given that most of an app isn't executable binaries (and hasnt been since forever) the size of executables isn't a big deal.
(A few years ago I had to run Safari in 32-bit mode to test unity web apps for the brief period where unity didn't offer a 64-bit plugin.)
> 64b XP basically didn't exist ... And 64b on Windows is a complete fuck-up
What do you base those statements on? I changed to 64 bit at Windows XP, never looked back and stayed there on multiple machines through Vista, Win7 and now win8.
Windows Server 2008 R2 and Server 2012 are both 64 bit only. There are no 32-bit builds of these OSs.
Most desktop PCs may have 64-bit processors, but do they ship with 64-bit Windows OS? Apple's "fat binaries" containing 32-bit and 64-bit (or even PowerPC or ARM) binaries greatly simplified the Mac's transition to a 64-bit world.
In my experience, a few years back, whenever I bought/built a machine I had to explicitly ask for 64bit (if that's what I wanted). Nowadays, it seems to be the default even for the cheapest builds available.
Consider this, most default builds (even the cheap ones) come with at least 4GB of RAM nowadays. The only machines I see with less RAM now are nettops, netbooks and other miniaturized builds. You need 64-bit Windows to fully take advantage of 4GB (with 32-bit Windows, you'll only see like 3.something), not to mention anything larger than 4GB is essentially worthless to a 32-bit OS. Dell isn't going to sell you a laptop advertised with 6GB RAM and then stick a 32-bit version of Windows on there that can only use <4GB.
(Now, this 4GB limit to 32-bit OS's isn't a problem with PAE. But why Windows has support for PAE but nobody seriously uses it is a story I don't know the details to.)
I remember going to an MS Dev event for 64 bit XP (still have the shirt!) and being pretty excited about it, but bugger all worked in XP64. As someone who spent many (10+) years writing for Windows and now uses a Mac it's hard not to compare Apple's 64 bit switch to Microsoft's
While Windows certainly did arrive late to the 64-bit party (not entirely true - NT ran on Alphas), 32-bit processors (and limited address space) are a distant memory to most Unix (and Linux) users.
I still run 32-bit Linux on both computers, despite having 64 bit processors. One has 2GB of RAM, the other 3GB, so I see no reason to switch. Computers bought 3 years ago are hardly 'a distant memory'.
