Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Rollable review: The sci-fi laptop you can actually buy

At a glance

Expert's Rating

Pros

• Rollable OLED is reliable
• Extra screen space just a keypress away
• Solid Lunar Lake performance

Cons

• Expensive (naturally)
• Battery life takes a hit
• A portable monitor may be more practical
• Few ports

Our Verdict

The world’s first laptop unrolls extra screen real estate from below the keyboard at the push of a button. It works well, and the tradeoffs are all worth it if you want a rollable display. If the sticker price doesn’t phase you, you’ll love it.

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The Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable is a 14-inch laptop that unrolls into a tall 16.7-inch display when you press a button on the keyboard. Lenovo proudly proclaims this is the world’s first rollable laptop. You have a bunch of extra screen real estate built into your laptop, and you can access it at the press of a button.

I’m shocked how cool this is: Lenovo has taken the kind of product you’d see as a tech demo at CES and turned it into a real, solidly engineered laptop that anyone can buy. Yes, it’s expensive, but the fact that you can get this kind of one-of-a-kind experience at a few thousand bucks is just awesome.

Lenovo has been delivering lots of wild laptop concepts, like the dual-display Yoga Book 9i. Given the price, these laptops aren’t for most people. But if you like the idea, they’re the only real game in town. Lenovo should be applauded for delivering these concepts as real, buyable products. Machines like these demonstrate why PCs are awesome.

Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable: Specs

The Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable is available in one single configuration. This laptop includes an Intel Core Ultra 7 258V CPU — that’s a Lunar Lake CPU, which means it has excellent battery efficiency and impressive integrated graphics performance alongside an NPU powerful enough for Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC features.

However, Lunar Lake only has eight cores — four performance cores and four low-power efficient cores — so CPU-heavy multithreaded workflows will lag compared to other CPU architectures. Alongside that, Lenovo includes a generous 32GB of RAM and 1TB of SSD storage.

• Model number: Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable
• CPU: Intel Core Ultra 7 258V
• Memory: 32GB LPDDR5X
• Graphics/GPU: Intel Arc 140V
• NPU: Intel AI Boost (48 TOPS)
• Display: 14-inch 2000×1600 OLED display that unrolls into a 16.7-inch 2000×2350 display, 120Hz refresh rate
• Storage: 1TB PCIe Gen4 SSD
• Webcam: 1440p camera
• Connectivity: 2x Thunderbolt 4 (USB Type-C), 1x combo audio jack
• Networking: Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4
• Biometrics: Fingerprint reader and IR camera for facial recognition
• Battery capacity: 66 Watt-hours
• Dimensions: 11.95 x 9.08 x 0.75 inches
• Weight: 3.72 pounds
• MSRP: $3,299 as tested

Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable: Design and build quality

IDG / Chris Hoffman

The Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable has great build quality, actually! This does not feel like the world’s first rollable laptop — it feels like a polished second or third generation version of the concept.

At a glance, the Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 looks like a silver Lenovo ThinkBook laptop that’s just a bit bulkier than normal. It has a serious-looking hinge, which looks like the kind of hinge you’d see on a 2-in-1 machine.

Aside from the slight extra bulk — it’s only a bit thicker than normal, and at 3.72 pounds, it’s not even that much heavier than a normal laptop — this could pass for a standard Lenovo laptop — until you see the screen. Rather than the screen ending in a bezel, the screen continues past a seam down into the laptop, under the keyboard.

To unroll the laptop, you just have to ensure it’s at the right angle — 90 degrees works, or a bit further back — and then press the key to the right of F12. A motor kicks into action and unrolls the screen, making the laptop taller as the rollable OLED display unrolls from underneath the keyboard. To roll it back up, you’ll press the key again. (If your screen isn’t at a good angle for rolling, the key won’t do anything.)

The motor and hinge feel incredibly reliable. Time will be the real test, but this feels solid. In fact, it feels more reliable than my foldable Galaxy Phone, as I’m folding that with my hands using various degrees of pressure, while this machine has a motor that unrolls and rolls it nicely.

Lenovo includes its own software that handles resolution switching when the screen rolls and unrolls, as well as a “ThinkBook Workspace” pane designed to live at the bottom area of the screen when it’s unrolled. Workspace works fine, but I preferred to stick with my usual Windows software.

Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable: Keyboard and trackpad

IDG / Chris Hoffman

The Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable has a fine keyboard. Lenovo tends to be good at keyboards, and this feels on the shallow side compared to other Lenovo keyboards I’ve used. A slightly shallow keyboard is no surprise: This machine, after all, has a display that rolls up and fits under the keyboard. It’s not mushy, but it is a tad rubbery and doesn’t feel as “snappy” as I’d like. This isn’t even a criticism — of course a rollable laptop won’t have the most keyboard travel.

If you like the idea of a rollable laptop, you shouldn’t let the keyboard stop you. If you’re wondering whether other high-end Lenovo laptops like the ThinkPad X1 Carbon have snappier keyboards, though: Yes, yes they do.

This machine has a touchpad that’s a good size. It’s a haptic trackpad, too — that means you can customize the action and use the whole touchpad surface to click down. Combined with the size, it’s a great touchpad with smooth action. However, the surface feels a little rubbery, and a glass touchpad always feels a little smoother under the finger to me.

These really aren’t criticisms — I’m just relaying what the experience of using the laptop is like. The keyboard and trackpad work well, and you’ll be pleased with them if the rollable display is your main draw here.

Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable: Display and speakers

IDG / Chris Hoffman

The Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable’s display is its star feature. It’s a rollable OLED display with a 120Hz refresh rate and up to 400 nits of brightness. When rolled up, it’s a 14-inch display with a 2000×1600 resolution. When unrolled, it’s a tall 16.7-inch display with a 2000×2350 resolution.

If you’ve used a foldable phone, you’ll be familiar with the “crease” in the middle of the display, where it folds. Since it’s a rollable, it doesn’t have a single crease, but it does have some crease-look visual artifacts where it folds. They’re very well hidden — you have to look at it from just the right angle in just the right lighting to see anything that looks unusual.

The screen looks good, but make no mistake: The rollability is its main feature. I’ve seen laptops with high-end OLED displays that are brighter with more vivid colors. But, for a rollable display with such an unusual size and resolution, this is an impressive showing.

This is not a touch-screen display, however. If you’re looking for a touch screen, this is not the machine for you.

This machine’s Harman Kardon speakers sound unusually great. I test every laptop I review by playing Steely Dan’s Aja and Daft Punk’s Get Lucky. They had plenty of volume, and the audio quality was crisp with decent instrument separation in Aja. The sound was balanced enough in Get Lucky that, even without a ton of bass, the sound sounded great — nothing tinny and enough bass to be fun. We’re grading on a scale since these are laptop speakers, of course — but these are unusually good.

Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable: Webcam, microphone, biometrics

The Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable has a 1440p 5MP webcam that offers a clear image without visual noise even in lighting conditions that weren’t the most ideal. Lenovo didn’t cut any corners here, and this is the kind of webcam that will make you look professional in online meetings. Also, since this machine meets Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC requirements, it has access to Windows Studio Effects for real-time webcam effects like fake eye contact and background blur. And it has a privacy shutter switch, too.

The dual-array microphone setup sounds excellent, and it picked up my voice in high quality. The ThinkBook line of PCs is marketed for business users, and Lenovo has delivered hardware that works very well for online meetings.

This machine offers both a fingerprint scanner and an IR camera, so you can sign into your PC and authenticate with