If I recall correctly, Apple went straight to 64 bits during the Intel transition. If they didn't, it wasn't long after so devs were still in the process of porting over to Intel anyway.
Software-wise 64 bit userland processes were supported since Tiger (CLI and Cocoa only, Carbon UI stayed 32 bit) before the kernel itself moved to 64 bits in Snow Leopard (although IIRC not the default except on Xserve and Mac Pro, the two that could have loads of RAM. You could tell it to boot the 64 bit kernel through nvram boot args or something though)
A few Macs had a 64 bit CPU but a 32 bit only bootloader/firmware. That made them disqualified for one of the major OS version updates when it required a full 64 bit boot chain.
https://everymac.com/mac-answers/snow-leopard-mac-os-x-faq/m...