They’ve been gone for the past 9 years. You’ll need a dongle. Though, I wouldn’t recommend keeping the only copy of stuff on a thumb drive. They’re good, but can be prone to failure.
To be fair it is an absolute pain. I have an old-fashioned USB-C fang gamepad that I absolutely need for gaming, plus Logitech seem intent on never ever creating dongles which are USB-C. to that end, I have just ordered myself two short adapters. but I hate using those, because it is an inelegant solution.
Framework Laptop would be the only laptop that allows for majority of the ports to USB-A
If you’re very accident prone, i would highly suggest you to stay away from macbooks are they are one of the most fragile laptops. Go for a thinkpad or something of that sort. If you want macOS just buy a mac mini.
When ports changed in the past, apple often had a cross over for a year or two, sometimes even 3. Not this time though. They went full bandaid and it’s stupid. Come one, the current pros have more than enough thickness for one.
Just for example. When FireWire 800 came out. Laptops and desktops often had both 800 and 400 ports for a few years.
When thunderbolt came out, the 15" 2011 MacBook Pro still had an express 34 slot.
When they got rid of FireWire, they made a thunderbolt (FireWire and USB don’t mix) for a few years.
A lot of people get terrified by newer laptops because there are so few (only 2 or even 1) USB-C ports.
The fact is, the way USB ports are used has changed. USB has changed from a single-device protocol into (USB-C) a docking station protocol.
You connect 6 devices including your power supply into your dongle. You have a dongle that lives at home and a 2nd that lives at work as they only cost about $25 for a candybar dongle with 3xUSB, HDMI, Ethernet, Power Delivery, maybe card readers, etc. so you just connect 1 USB to dock, at home or at work. Almost nobody ever carries a dongle - only on plane trips would you ever need to be carrying a dongle …
Nobody plugs the mouse, keyboard, camera, or hdmi into a laptop any more. That’s a waste of time when you can plug all 4 into a single USB-C delivering all this - and power, too! At work its 3 secs to grab your laptop and go to a meeting, and 3 secs to return. You save 2 mins a day with a dongle. A USB-C dongle pays for itself in 6 months with the time savings!
You can buy a thumb drive that has both USB-C and USB-A - SanDisk Ultra 256
In addition to slimming down the laptop as others have said, the other reason is that cloud storage for everyday computing continues to grow which is good for school as you’ll be spending much of your learning time online and would benefit from not having to fumble with (or potentially misplacing) flash drives when working on term papers, assignments and sharing notes, projects, etc. with classmates and teachers.