When my sister started grad school at Harvard she bought a brand new 64-bit Dell laptop from the school store that came preinstalled with 32-bit Windows. I was amazed.

I wiped the computer and installed a 64-bit OS, but there are definitely people out there selling 64-bit PCs running 32-bit Windows out of cluelessness.

Haha. I helped out IT for a major corporation. This was only a few-ish years ago, but we were just moving to Windows 7 from XP.

It was funny, because the only XP image they had was 32 bit. So we had really new PCs (Dells that are now 5-7 years old) running on these 32bit machines, with no choice by their IT staff: they couldn't make a new image (was a "global IT" thing).

So, they gave us a Windows 7 image that was only 32bit. Fun getting that one sorted before it was on everyone's PCs.

> Because some users still have 32-bit computers. How is this not obvious?

It is completely not obvious that there are Windows 10 users with 32-bit computers.

Here's an analysis from Debian trying to figure out whether to default to the 64-bit image: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2017/06/msg00059.html

    No one installs i386 new -- machines that are non-amd64-capable are:
    * mainstream machines from 2004 and earlier
    * a brief wave of mobile devices, now thankfully gone
    * deeply embedded, usually incapable of running [the standard Debian installer]

From the followup comments, there were apparently a few netbooks using the mobile chipsets as late as 2012, but I doubt a netbook from 2012 using a mobile chipset is going to be well-supported by Windows 10, regardless of CPU architecture.

Which 32bit cpu would anyone want to use Windows 10 on? That has to be a real pain.

> He's talking like there are people with 64-bit PCs running 32-bit Windows out of cluelessness or spite.

Cause this is what's going on, he's stating that explicitly.

There are entire companies with deployments of 32-bit Windows 7 installs.