You’ve seen that person at the cafe — maybe you’ve even been that person. They have the laptop with external monitors precariously stacked on top, typing away furiously. Maybe you thought there had to be a better way! If so, you’re not alone, because the folks at Lenovo thought so, too. The Lenovo Thinkbook Plus Gen 6 Rollable sneaks in a whole half a display’s worth of screen space into what looks like a normal laptop, with a split screen mode allowing users to multitask more effectively.
The laptop looks like any other when you open it up, but at the press of a dedicated button, and the display and chassis will extend upward, turning a 14-inch display into a 16.7-inch display. When not in use, the extra display is rolled up tightly within the chassis, which is the latest use of flexible OLED panels that have also enabled the current crop of foldable smartphones.
Lenovo has been working on the idea of rolling up an OLED display in a laptop for a while. At Mobile World Congress 2023, Lenovo showed off a prototype of this very laptop, which didn’t look too different from what we’re now getting as a fully fledged product we can buy. By hiding away the extra display, Lenovo has been able to pack more screen space into a laptop without making it heavier and bulkier — despite having a 16.7-inch display when extended, the Thinkbook Plus Gen 6 Rollable weighs just 2.20 pounds and is just under 20mm thick, with the chassis of a 14-inch laptop.
Lenovo has work in mind with this laptop — it’s a natural fit for media professionals who need to edit images or videos, programmers who need to review and write code, or even students who need to watch a lecture while also taking notes on their laptop. Instead of the scrunched up split-screen they’d normally get from Windows on a 14-inch PC, they can use the extra screen space to more comfortably use two applications at once.
That focus on portability is in keeping with the history of the Thinkbook Plus line. Lenovo has always used the Thinkbook Plus to showcase different approaches to adding more screen space and productivity to a laptop. The Gen 4 laptop had a second E Ink display on the back with a swivel hinge to switch between the two. Last year’s Gen 5 machine had a display and keyboard that could operate independently, with the option to wirelessly connect the separated keyboard to a larger external monitor while using the display as a tablet.
No matter the form, Lenovo has never skimped on power in the Thinkbook Plus – they’ve always been high-end machines showcasing Lenovo’s latest experiments. This year’s model will come with Intel’s more powerful line of Core Ultra processors, which should be able to handle the extra load from all that multitasking. They’ll also be ready to tackle on-device AI features, like image generation and live translations. No surprise, then, that the Thinkbook Plus Gen 6 is a Windows CoPilot+ PC, meaning that it has full access to Microsoft’s suite of on-device and cloud AI features.
We won’t have to wait much longer for the experiment to become reality — according to Lenovo, the Thinkbook Plus Gen 6 Rollable will be available sometime in the first few months of this year, starting at $3,500.
This story has been brought to you in partnership with Lenovo and the Women Influencer’s Network. All thoughts and opinions are 100% our own.