Then there was the short netbook boom, but AFAIR some early ones had 64bit CPUs but 32bit-only firmware.
My memory is that at the height of the boom the dominant processors were the N270 and N280, which are 32-bit only. By the time 64-bit netbook processors showed up the boom was on the decline.
There are at least two more:
5. People running Debian on virtual machines. You can run an i386 VM with vmware or virtualbox with no special hardware support. An x86-64 VM on the other hand requires VT-x (or the AMD equivilent). While processor support for this is the norm nowadays it's still often disabled by default which can be a pain if you need to get IT support to access bios setup on a machine.
i386 hardware is so numerous and widely spread, that every tiny fraction of i386 users might be more users than half of our release architectures combined. It is not even clear whether this is just an exaggeration or might be literally true:
i386 still gives 17281 popcon submissions, that is about a tenth of amd64, but it's also over 10 times the next highest port Now that probably doesn't reflect true usage, in particular users who install using images tend to miss out on the popcon question, but I still suspect that i386 is up there in the top few most used architectures.
