Lenovo’s rollable laptop is the coolest computer I’ve used all year

Part of me still can’t believe it, but Lenovo did the thing: it took a bonkers concept for a laptop with a rollable screen and built the tech into something you can actually own and use like a normal computer. Except, as conventional as the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 can be, it’s far from a normal computer. It’s a $3,300 laptop with a screen that expands from 14 inches to 16.7 inches at the push of a button.

Oh, and it’s actually good. Not just good, but very good. I still can’t believe it.

The expanding screen is genuinely useful, and it makes the ThinkBook by far one of the coolest and most futuristic-looking laptops I’ve ever used. But, as with most new technologies, being at the bleeding edge is costly. And as you might expect for a laptop that physically gets taller, there are some growing pains, too.

When you first open the ThinkBook Plus, you’ll see a square-ish 14 inch OLED display with a 120Hz refresh rate and a 2000×1600 resolution. But press a button, and the screen unrolls to a taller 16.7-inches and 2000 x 2350 resolution. (I affectionately call it “the tallboy.”) With the screen extended, it’s like working with two stacked 12.4-inch 16:9 displays. It’s some of the best single-monitor multitasking I’ve experienced. The extra vertical space is great for going full-screen in a document, code editor, or spreadsheet, or for split-screening apps without cutting off the sides of the windows. You can get the benefits of a vertical display anywhere, not just in a multi-monitor desk setup. And the ThinkBook itself makes a great vertical sidecar to a big monitor.

Tallboy mode even makes video calls more pleasant, since it brings the webcam much closer to eye level. Having the top of the screen higher has also helped relieve a bit of neck pain from staring down at laptops all day. I get improved ergonomics whether I’m working at my desk, a table, or in goblin mode on my floor.

I’ve been using the new ThinkBook Plus full-time for about a week, and I’ve kept it in 16.7-inch mode almost the entire time, because that’s the whole point of this thing. I never get sick of looking at this giant OLED with its punchy colors and strong contrast. It’s plastic instead of glass for the sake of flexibility, and it lacks touch support (though that also means less chance of scratching its softer surface with a fingernail or accidentally knocking it over with a tap). But I don’t mind any of that, because having so much screen real estate in a laptop this compact and portable was unreal up until now.

As with a foldable phone, you can see some creases and ripples in the screen’s lower third — the part that rolls up — especially at oblique angles. If I look closely while working on a bright-white document, I can sometimes make out a faint shadowy strip, but I rarely see it, even when staring at that spot. The motorized screen takes about eight seconds to extend or retract, and it’s no louder than the fans on an average gaming laptop. People right near you in a quiet space will hear it, but even ambient sounds like a TV in the background easily mask the motor.

Lenovo had to go to some lengths to accommodate this screen while keeping the ThinkBook looking and feeling like a normal-ish laptop. Its chassis is aluminum instead of the carbon fiber, magnesium, and plastic found in the ThinkPad X1 Carbon — one of Lenovo’s go-to models of productivity / business laptops. That makes the ThinkBook pretty heavy for its size: at 3.72 pounds, it’s a whole pound and a half heavier than the X1 Carbon and a pound heavier than a 13-inch MacBook Air. The extra weight is likely necessary to keep the laptop from falling over backward when the screen is extended. The hinge is also very stiff. It takes two hands to pry open the laptop from its closed position, and the hinge doesn’t tilt back nearly as far as other laptops to prevent toppling. The limited range of motion is less of a big deal in tall mode, but more noticeable in 14-inch mode. However, I usually put it in 14-inch mode only when it’s time to close it up and move it around, so it hasn’t bothered me much yet.

Despite the laptop’s general sturdiness, the screen itself can be a little wobbly, with audible creaks and slight knocking sounds when you’re adjusting it. The lid consists of an inner frame and outer frame; the outer frame moves along a track on the edges of the inner frame to expand the lid’s footprint and roll the screen upward. The irksome sounds come from where the two lid frames meet in the middle.

Because part of the screen is garaged under the keyboard deck, there’s no space next to the keyboard for the speakers, so instead they’re at the front of the chassis, angled down. They’re mediocre for a $3,300 laptop, and the sound is often obscured by your wrists.

The other audible quirk is the ThinkBook’s “you’re doing it wrong” alarm: If you start closing the lid with the screen extended, or you move the screen while it’s rolling, the laptop emits a high-pitched tone. It’s the most 90s-motherboard-ass thing I’ve heard in a long time, but I find its needling sound oddly charming.

The rest of the laptop is solid, as you’d hope for a $3,300 machine. It has a haptic trackpad (hallelujah). Despite being slightly small, it beats the heck out of all the Lenovo mechanical trackpads I’ve tried, rivaling Apple’s in precision and feel. It’s a great counterpart to the keyboard, which is excellent as usual for Lenovo, with a great tactile feel and good key travel. The built-in mic sounds good, and that high-climbing webcam renders a fairly sharp image. It handles mixed or difficult lighting well, while capturing you at a more pleasing angle. (Look, it’s okay not to want your webcam to accentuate double chins or give people a view up your nostrils.) It’s a shame it only has two Thunderbolt 4 ports, but bigger port crimes have been committed elsewhere, and at least there’s a headphone jack.

Lenovo ships the ThinkBook Plus with its own Workspace app to help with multitasking on the oddly proportioned display. It offers quick access to pinnable widgets, apps, and even enabling a virtual display for a picture-in-picture experience — if you’re so inclined . You can choose to have Workspace auto-launch when you expand the screen, and there’s even a dedicated key for it. But I found it more troublesome than helpful, and I encountered bugs when using Workspace with multiple virtual desktops, ranging from glitching my wallpaper to preventing me from four-finger swiping between desktops. Instead, I’ve just been using Windows 11’s native window management, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how well it works on this shapeshifting screen. I encountered a one-off bug where the taskbar randomly disappeared, but it was solved by a full restart.

Performance-wise, the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V in the ThinkBook lines up with other laptops we’ve tested with the same chip. It’s fast for everyday tasks and productivity apps, and it’s about as power efficient as other models with much smaller, non-OLED screens. I could easily last nine hours or longer on a charge with the default sleep / power settings, getting me through a full day of work in mixed usage (Google Docs, Slack, Signal chat, lots of Chrome tabs, and even a 30-minute video call and equally long audio call). And that whole time I rarely heard its fan spin up or felt it heat up. On another day, I stretched it to nearly eight full hours with the screen kept on nearly the whole time in tall mode.

Fun fact: draining the battery to below five percent activates a countdown timer for the screen to automatically roll down and stay down until it turns off or you plug in. So you shouldn’t get stuck with the screen extended and no way to pack it up. Not bad, Lenovo. Not bad.

$3,300 can get you a lot of other excellent laptops (three great $1,000 laptops, even), but none of them have this extending display. It’s one of only a few ways to get more screen in a conventionally sized laptop. You can get a dual-screen laptop like the Yoga Book 9i or Asus Zenbook Duo, or a folding-screen laptop like the ThinkPad X1 Fold , or opt for some kind of portable monitor. But as much as I dig those, a dual-screen or folding-screen setup is so cumbersome by comparison. You’re not just strolling into a coffee shop and hitting a button to get more screen, you’re setting up camp with your Franken-multi-monitor-laptop and its peripherals.

The ThinkBook Plus has seemed pretty durable in my time with it. I even had it rattling around in a backpack on a 500-mile road trip, and it was fine. Lenovo claims the screen is rated for 30,000 hinge openings / closings and 20,000 rolls up and down, but you just don’t have those concerns with regular laptops. As much as I love using this rollable laptop, I’ll always be a little wary about longevity and what a screen repair may cost if the worst ever happens (Lenovo did not answer my questions about repair costs by the time of publication).

The ThinkBook Plus rollable is a genuinely cool idea, and a great laptop. I hope the display tech continues to evolve and we see more wild ideas like this become a reality. Or, if Lenovo delivers on its other recent concept laptop idea, the ThinkBook Flip, maybe we can get a similar tall-monitor experience without the added heft and cost of motors.

This could be the start of a rolling-screen revolution. Or it could just be a niche product for deep-pocketed folks who want to feel like they’re living in the future. Sadly, one of these realities is much more likely for now, until the tech gets cheap enough to trickle down to mainstream laptops. But damn am I happy this thing is out in the real world, even if spotting one at a random cafe will feel like a unicorn sighting. Lenovo is one of the only laptop manufacturers that turns its weird concepts into actual products, and I hope it keeps pushing — getting cheaper, quirkier, or ideally both.