You're probably thinking of home use (where, if you're buying a Mac, you're probably also thinking ahead and investing into something to move its files around); or maybe university lab use.
I bet the GP, meanwhile, is thinking about (pre-university) educational use-cases. Public-school computer labs were a big part of Apple's market share from the late '80s until the early '00s.
When I was small (late '80s), we had a single Apple II per classroom. Those machines has no networking or storage, other than the 5.25" drive. Usually we weren't saving anything, just using stateless educational software/games; but every once in a while, we'd all be run through some program, which would save our work to a single shared classroom "state" floppy.
Later, we had computer labs full of Macs (Color Classic IIs, if I recall), but still no computer network — nor assigned seating in the lab — so saving data on the lab computers themselves was pointless/untenable. Instead, we were expected to bring a 3.5" floppy disk to school with us to save our work on. It was a school supply!
And that's basically how computing in schools continued to work, riiiiight up until the iMac era. Which is both when there began to be no economical data storage medium you could expect every five-year-old's parents to easily purchase as a school supply (flash drives were "pay a premium for portability" products in 1998, not the commodities they are now); and also when computer local-networking stacks began to really be standardized (no more AppleTalk, only Ethernet), lowering the barriers to schools building IT competence, and so enabling even elementary schools to start setting up computer networks, with user directories, roaming user accounts, and central file storage.
But despite now having a place to save things at school that didn't require any disks, you were suddenly put in a tough spot if you wanted to bring work home with you. If you weren't one of the rich kids with a USB stick, then email was pretty much the only solution! (Not necessarily actually sending email; I recall people opening webmail, attaching documents, and then saving the message as a Draft.)
Yeah, the disposable nature of floppies was key; sure they were small, but if you lost one you didn't cry all night (unless it had your only copy of your thesis on it).
That wasn't really solved until the era of the "affordable" CD burner, so there was a moderately painful 1998-2001 or so era where you had to do some tricks often or trust someone with a relatively expensive piece of equipment.
Even in 2000 a burner was around $250 or more, but spending $15 or whatever on a ZIP disk was painful even then, if you weren't sure you'd get it back.
LaTeX and git work really well and you can push to somewhere remote as a backup (and will usually retain the ability to pick through the ref-logs if something goes wrong). LaTeX is super super popular in the academic world and it wouldn't be surprising for a thesis to be required to be submitted in LaTeX anyway.
Github has a word-by-word visual diff thing that would be really nice since usually you don't want to consider whitespace to be semantically significant in the context of a diff, eg word wrapping.
The business world likes to fret over every detail and I get it but a lot of powerpoint presentations/etc could really be done pretty simply with a latex template, and git checkin/merging/etc is sooo nice. Let alone chapter material or stuff that needs equations/figures, a bibliography manager, table of contents, etc. Super super nice for cross referencing, kind of like a generalized form of javadocs, and it does layout pretty well with some help, and it doesn't randomly spazz out and break borders etc.
Etckeeper is really nice for change tracking for your /etc folder too... love being able to look back and see if there's been any changes that might have broken stuff, get a log of package updates etc.
You're probably thinking of home use (where, if you're buying a Mac, you're probably also thinking ahead and investing into something to move its files around); or maybe university lab use.
I bet the GP, meanwhile, is thinking about (pre-university) educational use-cases. Public-school computer labs were a big part of Apple's market share from the late '80s until the early '00s.
When I was small (late '80s), we had a single Apple II per classroom. Those machines has no networking or storage, other than the 5.25" drive. Usually we weren't saving anything, just using stateless educational software/games; but every once in a while, we'd all be run through some program, which would save our work to a single shared classroom "state" floppy.
Later, we had computer labs full of Macs (Color Classic IIs, if I recall), but still no computer network — nor assigned seating in the lab — so saving data on the lab computers themselves was pointless/untenable. Instead, we were expected to bring a 3.5" floppy disk to school with us to save our work on. It was a school supply!
And that's basically how computing in schools continued to work, riiiiight up until the iMac era. Which is both when there began to be no economical data storage medium you could expect every five-year-old's parents to easily purchase as a school supply (flash drives were "pay a premium for portability" products in 1998, not the commodities they are now); and also when computer local-networking stacks began to really be standardized (no more AppleTalk, only Ethernet), lowering the barriers to schools building IT competence, and so enabling even elementary schools to start setting up computer networks, with user directories, roaming user accounts, and central file storage.
But despite now having a place to save things at school that didn't require any disks, you were suddenly put in a tough spot if you wanted to bring work home with you. If you weren't one of the rich kids with a USB stick, then email was pretty much the only solution! (Not necessarily actually sending email; I recall people opening webmail, attaching documents, and then saving the message as a Draft.)