The Lenovo laptop with an unrolling screen is finally upon us.
The Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable is an AI PC powered by an Intel Core Ultra processor. When not in use, the bottom half of the screen rolls up like a newspaper. It’s just as novel as it sounds.
When the OLED laptop unrolls, it extends vertically from 14 diagonal inches to 16.7 diagonal inches, adding nearly 50% more screen space. It will go on sale on Thursday.
The prototype Laptop Mag saw at CES extended its screen after you pushed a button, but it appears that the screen on the laptop that will ship this week also extends by hand.
Lenovo rollable laptop history and benefits
It officially debuted at CES in 2025, though Lenovo showed off the prototype in October 2022. After missing a March release date, Intel announced on Monday that Lenovo would sell the laptop on Thursday, just 971 days since Lenovo first uploaded a YouTube video about the concept.
Intel says the laptop took two years of engineering to complete and presented a number of challenges, not least of which was producing two tiny motors that unroll and roll the screen. This caused more problems, like where to position the other laptop components displaced by the motors — like the circuit board and battery — which had to be redesigned.
The ThinkBook Gen 6 creates a taller screen and also allows you to use the display as two screens. Our hands-on experience with it felt ready-made for reading articles, mapping projects, or using digital whiteboard tools — any situation where a taller laptop screen would benefit you.
We haven’t confirmed this, but Intel claims that Excel spreadsheets go from 39 visible rows to 66 when the screen is unrolled. In a wonderful bit of symmetry, two 16:9 images fit on top of each other. Finally, in this era of vertical video, Instagram and TikTok content can appear in all its glory.
Lenovo has been teasing the rollable technology for years. In 2022, Luca Rossi, president of Lenovo’s Intelligent Devices Group, explained in a video how the expanding-display tech would work on phones and laptops.
“The possibilities of a rollable laptop are also compelling,” Rossi says in that video. “It will bring multitasking, browsing, and mobility applications to another level. I believe form factor innovation is a very dynamic space, and you will continue to see Lenovo’s innovation here.”
There’s more behind-the-curtain brilliance shared in Monday’s announcement from Intel regarding how hardware engineers had to solve the complex problems associated with a laptop screen that unrolls and rolls back up. A joint team of Lenovo and Intel engineers at Lenovo’s R&D Center in Shanghai faced problems that fell like dominoes before them.
For one, when that hot screen is rolled up like a newspaper, it heats the whole laptop, which creates another problem: How do you turn off the rolled-up part of the screen?
Once that problem was solved, they had to figure out how to compensate for lag when the screen expanded so the images would adjust seamlessly to the larger display.
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“We engineered all the thermal technology and power control to happen inside the Intel Core Ultra system-on-chip dynamic thermal tuning tool, or DTT,” said Zheng Jiong, Intel’s senior director of Customer Engineering in China, in a statement released Monday.
“We worked with Lenovo to apply these technologies to control the thermal and manage the power. Then, in an industry first, we customized the Intel graphics driver software in a way to create the very smooth screen transition.”
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Lenovo rollable laptop price and specs
Any discussion of a new product’s price should be taken with a grain of salt, as everyone has different budgets and opinions on the right price point for a device with a first-of-its-kind form factor.
With that in mind, the price may shock some who don’t find the appeal in a taller screen or bleeding-edge technology more generally. But if you want to be among the first, be prepared to spend more than you might on a laptop with a comparable configuration.
With that out of the way, the Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable starts at $3,499 and will be sold on Lenovo.com along with the other outlets where you find Lenovo products. As of Tuesday, no listing for the laptop was on Lenovo.com.
Given the hardcore engineering required to produce this laptop, one might better understand what can be seen as a higher-than-market-value price tag. After all, the first cell phone cost about $4,000 ($11,500 when adjusted for inflation). A pineapple cost the equivalent of $8,000 in 1700s America. Things cost more when they are new, whether because of rarity or innovation.
Lenovo no doubt hopes the price of this new rollable laptop goes down because that very likely means it has a hit on its hands.
