I would be very surprised to see a Noctua fan fail after only a year (even in horizontal mounting), they are not your average crappy sleeve bearing job after all and are rarely run all out to boot.
Realistically, I would expect even basic fans to last a long time when mounted vertically and generally run at modest speeds. The 140 mm intake fans that came with my Fractal Define R5 have been running for a year now and are no louder than they were then, though admittedly they have a very easy life most of the time (one is only running when needed, and they're rarely seeing more than a good 700/500 rpm). The Noctua fan on my NH-U14S is usually idling away at around 300 rpm, ramping up to 700-850 when CPU package power is pushing 125 watts (my current PL1 setting). That is definitely audible then, but going down to 600 rpm at a little over 70 W (with case fans at a tad under 500 rpm) is letting the noise fade into the background once again. (Most noise at 125 W is actually coming from the intake fans.) It is a soundproofed case sitting under the desk, and that helps, of course.
Now generally, listening to music imposes little load onto a computer and does not involve running Prime95 in Small FFTs mode in the background, so there is no reason why a reasonably efficient machine should not be able to run very quietly with the right fans and some fan curve tweaking. My machine generally takes about 15 W from the mains when idling, around 20 under light load and maybe 30 when watching YT, so that's really not a great deal of heat load to get rid of.
Also, unless you're buying a passively cooled laptop, it might end up being louder than a desktop. I had to bodge an undervolted (running from 5V USB) Scythe fan onto the stand that my work laptop (Thinkpad T14 Gen2) sits on to stop the internal fan spinning at high RPM...
Absolutely. The trend to thinner and thinner devices has not done acoustics any favors. If they had stayed as quiet as my old Dell Latitude E6520 or a pre-Optimus Thinkpad T510, with little more than the noise of air whooshing, it would have been acceptable, although that's still a bit more than I'd want to have right in front of me. The noise profile is much heavier on midrange and highs than what a PC under the desk will emit, which is disadvantageous in the light of human hearing sensitivity. We didn't go to fans as big as 120/140 mm for a reason.
(Mind you, my office PC only has 92s on the CPU and exhaust and is super quiet, too. The 92mm Noctua I put on there turned out to keep running at even lower speeds and is idling around 200 rpm, and I used the supplied silicone rubber nipples to decouple the exhaust fan, a basic BeQuiet Pure Wings 2 that makes in into the low 500s. That whole system idles at 18 W, so not much going on there either. Some bitumen mat and foam had previously been applied, too.)
