You don't need a laptop but the degree of uselessness depends on what courses you're taking.
Any math related courses laptops are not normal, not encouraged and sometimes even discouraged. Besides being useless (equation editors are way too slow to keep up) some profs will be very annoyed at you if you bring one in since its obvious that you're not paying attention to them. People who do bring them to a math class usually are tempted to bring up youtube or another time waster, then they distract everyone around them.
In courses where you just need to write words down they might be useful if you have bad/slow writing but still not needed. It varies from school to school but a lot of courses have nearly complete notes that you buy before the course or are made available online. Then you just write in the margins if there's anything extra.
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