Lenovo’s newest ThinkBook laptop ‘unrolls’ for extra screen space

Lenovo’s rollable laptop debuted as a concept several years ago. Now, it’s real and ready for prime time. Dubbed the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable, this futuristic laptop with an unrolling, expandable screen will ship in the first quarter of 2025.

Priced at about $3,500, the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 parallels Lenovo’s existing Yoga Book 9i, which debuted in 2023 with a pair of screens sandwiched together. But the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable puts one screen behind the other with the rear one able to extend out, so instead of forcing one screen to replace the keyboard, the Rollable preserves Lenovo’s keyboard design. It’s a solid compromise on both fronts.

While in its compact mode, the Rollable offers a fairly standard 120Hz 400-nit OLED display with 100 percent DCI-P3 color accuracy, measuring 14 inches on the diagonal. But when unrolled, the display expands to about 16.7 inches on the diagonal. This essentially turns its standard landscape display into portrait mode. If you’ve ever used a portrait mode display, you know that it can either be used to display a long document vertically or be subdivided into two or three landscape windows. The latter is probably how you’ll use the Gen 6 Rollable.

Lenovo

Even handier, Lenovo has anticipated that you’ll use the screen in this way and has thus made those new, virtual windows shareable. Put another way, if you want to share your screen in a Zoom or Teams call, you’ll be able to simply share that additional, created space without the need for an external monitor, Lenovo says.

Under the hood, the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable is more conventional. Inside is a Core Ultra Series 2 (Lunar Lake) chip, promising exceptional battery life even with the additional screen real estate. Lenovo hasn’t published the full dimensions, but cites “minimum” dimensions of 11.92 x 9.06 x 0.74 inches. The laptop weighs 3.73 pounds with a 66Wh battery inside, which is moderately heavy for a prosumer/business laptop.

Mark Hachman / IDG

The specs also appear to be relatively conventional: up to 32GB of LPDDR5x (8533 MT/s) RAM and up to 1TB of PCIe storage. Inside, Lenovo has included support for Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, and a pair of Thunderbolt 4 ports, plus a 5MP webcam. Lenovo wants the laptop to qualify for MIL-STD-810H drop testing but said the device is still being tested.

Lenovo will ship the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable with Windows 11 Pro but without a vPro chipset, signaling that this is a prosumer device. Its eventual sales will determine whether this rollable screen is a feature that will persist into future generations or be forgotten as a gimmick that’ll be phased out in favor of more conventional displays.

Mark Hachman / IDG