After a couple of years of development, the world’s first rollable display laptop, the Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable, was finally unveiled at CES 2025 this week.
The laptop, which can transition from a 14-inch landscape display to a 16.7-inch vertical display with a single button press, was first shown off two years ago as a concept device, but has now made the transition to production for 2025.
Powered by the Intel Core Ultra 200V series (up to a Core Ultra 7), the laptop will also feature up to 32GB of LPDDR5x memory and up to 1TB PCIe 4.0 SSD storage. As a Lunar Lake-powered laptop, it’ll also feature Intel Xe2 graphics, making it a good, lightweight choice for graphic designers who do a lot of work on portrait documents.
Throw in Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 connectivity, 2x2W Harman/Kardon speakers, and a dual mic array with 5MP IR webcam, and you have more than a niche laptop with a cool gimmick, but a powerful mobile workstation machine for professional users.
That said, the rollable display aspect of the laptop is the show stealer here, and anyone who values a vertical display, like software engineers or business users who work with a lot of documents, are going to be hard-pressed to find another laptop like the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable.
More than a cool form factor, the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable is genuinely functional in a way other laptops can’t be
The clamshell laptop form factor is one of those designs that I’d considered a ‘solved problem’. If you want a portable computer, this is the best way to design it, with a display that folds down onto the keyboard.
And since the keyboard layout is also a solved problem, laptops are mostly stuck with a landscape orientation, with older 4:3 ratio displays being the tallest they’ve been able to practically be.
For anyone who needs or wants a vertical orientation for their laptop, you’ve been out of luck and been forced to rely on portable monitors, which isn’t an ideal solution for portability.
With the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable though, you really do have an innovation that addresses this specific need, making it much more functional than a lot of other concept-to-production designs I’ve seen in laptops over the years (foldable display laptops being a perfect example).
And while dual-screen laptops exist, they’re somewhat hampered by the extra peripherals required to make them work, like a wireless keyboard and folding stand to hold them upright. With the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable though, you have everything in one complete unit, meaning you won’t have to worry about misplacing anything that you’ll need to make everything work.
Of course, one thing that the new laptop introduces that we haven’t needed to worry about since we got rid of spinning-disk HDD laptops is the introduction of moving mechanical parts, which can wear out over time.
A rollable display laptop isn’t great if the motor that rolls out the display breaks and now you can’t roll it up (or down, if you’re really unlucky), but by the time that happens, it might be time to upgrade the laptop anyway, and you just might have a whole lot more rollable display laptops on the market to choose from.
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John.Loeffler@futurenet.com (John Loeffler)
