It’s been more than 800 days since Lenovo first teased a laptop with a roll-up screen, but it will soon finally be ready for purchase — if you’ve got the scratch.
Lenovo unveiled the ThinkBook Gen 6 Plus laptop on Tuesday at CES, and it offers a bit of ‘60s wonder to the world of ever-more-staid laptops (though, sadly, this one is also gray). Though the images were leaked before the event, the laptop has still been the most talked-about offering from Lenovo here on the ground at CES in Las Vegas this year.
With the press of a button, a little jingle plays, a motor whirrs, and the laptop display grows taller over about seven seconds. It’s a bit of magic that has been the hallmark of CES over the decades, but can this roll-up laptop — or, more likely, one of its descendants — become a permanent fixture in the computer world?
The experience of using a new type of laptop
Whatever its future holds aside for a moment, what is evident is the surprise and delight you feel when the paradigm of a laptop display changes before your eyes and you start to use it.
The ThinkBook Gen 6 doesn’t just make a taller screen. It also allows you to use the display as two screens. From there, the productivity flywheel begins to turn, and using the machine feels about 10% like the first time you ever used a laptop as you navigate and adapt to new visual real estate. It's fun; even if the experience could feel a bit precarious with such an oblong laptop screen.
The display goes from 14 inches to 16.7 inches, creating the sort of vertical real estate perfect for productivity, if not gaming.
This machine is ready-made for reading articles, mapping projects, or using digital whiteboard tools — any situation where we’re often left wanting the all-too-rare vertically oriented display.
How long has this rollable laptop by Lenovo been in the works?
Since October 2022, Lenovo has been teasing the rollable technology. Then, Luca Rossi, president of Lenovo's Intelligent Devices Group, explains in a YouTube video how the expanding-display tech would work on phones and laptops.
"The possibilities of a rollable laptop are also compelling," Rossi says in that 2022 video. "It will bring multitasking, browsing, and mobility applications to another level. I believe form factor innovation is a very dynamic space, and you will continue to see Lenovo's innovation here."
Rossi was right — as a little more than two years later, it appears Lenovo is ready to take the next step with the expanding display tech at CES, the world's biggest technology show.
But what about that music?
The music that plays is a dreamy little jingle, but Lenovo reps who showed Laptop Mag the new laptop couldn’t answer whether the music could be turned off or changed. It’s pleasant enough, but it could be less-than-pleasant on the 1,000th play, or if you’re in a quiet room and forget to turn down the volume.
Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Specs
What's next
Lenovo tells Laptop Mag that the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 will begin shipping by March 31, 2025, or the end of the first quarter of this year. The starting cost is steeper than other laptops, at $3,499, which is as much as the Apple Vision Pro.
