Fanless x86 desktops are a thing too, in the form of thin clients and small PCs intended for business use. I have a few HP T630s I use as servers (I have used them as desktop PCs too, but my tab-hoarding habit makes them throttle a bit too much for my use - they'd be fine for a lot of people).
Sure you can, they’re readily available on the market, though not especially common.
But even performance laptops can often be run without spinning their fans up at all. Right now, the ambient temperature where I live is around 28°, and my four-year-old Ryzen 5800HS laptop hasn’t used its fan all day, though for a lot of that time it will have been helped by a ceiling fan. But even away from a fan for the last half hour, it sits in my lap only warm, not hot. It’s easy enough to give it a load it’ll need to spin the fan up for, but you can also limit it so it will never need its fan. (In summer when the ambient temperature is 10°C higher every day, you’ll want to use its fan even when idling, and it’ll be hard to convince it not to spin them up.)
x86-64 devices that are don’t even have fans won’t ever have such powerful CPUs, and historically have always been very underpowered. Like only 60% of my 5800HS’s single-threaded benchmarking and only 20% of its multithreaded. But at under 20% of the peak power consumption.
Apple, unlike a lot, if not all large companies (who are run by MBA beancounter morons), holds insanely large amounts of cash. That is how they can go and buy up entire markets of vendors - CNC mills, TSMC's entire production capacity for a year or two, specialized drills, god knows what else.
They effectively price out all potential competitors at once for years at a time. Even if Microsoft or Samsung would want to compete with Apple and make their own full aluminium cases, LED microdots or whatever - they could not because Apple bought exclusivity rights to the machines necessary.
Of course, there's nothing stopping Microsoft or Samsung to do the same in theory... the problem these companies have is that building the war chest necessary would drag down their stonk price way too much.
https://web.archive.org/web/20201108182313/http://atomicdeli...
https://www.capitaladvisors.com/research/war-chest-exploring...
They just don’t want to bet they can deploy it successfully in the hardware market to compete with Apple, so they focus on other things (cloud services, ads, media, etc).
Also, especially the MacBook Pros have really large batteries, on average larger than the competition. This increases the battery runtime.