32-bit x86 will be relevant for some time yet

Indeed. I was an amd64 early adopter, and ia32 (kernel, anyway) really is legacy in some ways, but my only full computer purchase (I usually upgrade a piece at a time) this century was a gen-1.5 32-bit-only atom-based netbook, Acer Aspire One, 150L (L for Linux, I had to order it imported from Canada, but no way was I going to be an eXPrivacy statistic, even if I did buy it with the express intent of immediately sticking Gentoo on it) -- before they killed things with the all but Linux incompatible outsourced graphics.

It's still going strong! One of the first things I did was add a 1-gig stick of RAM to it, it's one of the first netbooks with a regular SATA interface and I chose the 120 gig "rotating rust" drive, but I still plan to upgrade that to either 128/256 gig SSD or 500 gig "rotating rust" at some point. I just replaced the battery for the second time a few weeks ago.

As TFA mentions, we /are/ talking Debian cycles, here, but still. If it weren't for netbooks, and likely x86 based touchpads at some point, x86 /was/ headed toward footnote territory, but that gave it a new lease on life and now I expect it to be with us for some time.

Meanwhile, not directly related but food for thought: A lot of touch-screen based retail cash registers are P4 or similar based, now, often running MS-DOS with memory extenders and TSR-based networking and touch-input stacks. Either android or more traditional linux could eventually take that, on either x86-32 or arm.