Not in the past couple years though, there is really nothing significantly different in the hardware of a Samsung Galaxy s3 and a Nexus 6. Also, one of those laptops was manufactured in the late 90s.

Well, not anymore. Laptops, and computers had huge change from the 70's to the early 2000's.

We're going through the same technology change with mobiles now, but that even seems to be tapering off now.