Lenovo is bringing its rollable, expandable-screen laptop to market – ThinkBook Plus Gen 6’s display gets taller with the press of a button or the wave of a hand

When you're at your own desk, you can connect your laptop to one or more external monitors, but when you take your system on the road or to the kitchen table instead, you end up with just its built-in screen. You can solve the problem with one of the best portable monitors or do what Lenovo is doing with the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 and give you extra screen real estate on the laptop itself.

Back in the fall of 2022, Lenovo showed off a laptop concept with a rollable display that can get bigger by expanding vertically when you need more real estate. Here at CES 2025, the company is taking that concept to market as the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6, a 14-inch laptop that can expand to 16.7 inches by unfurling the entirety of its OLED screen.

Just hit a button on the upper right of the keyboard, and a motor causes the screen to grow by that 2.7 inches and the resolution jump from 2000 x 1600 to 2000 x 2350. You can also use a hand gesture to cause the screen to expand and retract and, when you do so, the wallpaper shows an animation of a car driving up a highway (or down a highway if retracting) while playing a little song.

We got to spend some hands-on time with the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 at Lenovo's CES demo suite and we were impressed with the execution of the expandable screen, though the song and animation (which can be turned off) grow old pretty quickly. We were particularly intrigued by the preloaded ThinkBook Workspace application, which helps you take advantage of the extra pixels.

You don't have to use ThinkBook Workspace at all, but the utility allows you to pin widgets like a to-do list at the bottom of your screen, run a virtual display (a window that the OS thinks is a separate monitor) or view Smart Copy, a searchable history of your clipboard. You can also put any app you want -- your web browser, for example -- into a tab in ThinkBook Workspace so that it remains pinned to the bottom of your screen while you run another window at the top of the screen.

While the laptop is indeed an impressive feat of engineering, and I certainly appreciate the idea of having a bigger screen and more pixels when my work gets complicated, the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 is a bigger, heavier laptop than you might expect given its 14-inch base screen size.

The company lists its dimensions as 0.78 inches thick and 3.73 pounds. Most 14-inch productivity laptops today are thinner and lighter than that, but it's not terrible to lift as we saw during demo at Lenovo's CES suite.

That extra size is of course due to the need to partially house the expandable display in the laptop’s base, as well as the motorized screen expansion mechanism in the lid. But there does, at least, also seem to be some accommodation for cooling and performance, as the laptop will be offered with a Core Ultra 9 vPro-enabled CPU, three M.2 slots, and up to 64GB of RAM.

Of course, it also features Copilot+ PC features, as well as some included software to help manage the tall display in a split-screen setup. The OLED screen sports 120 Hz refresh rate and a 400-nit brightness rating. At first glance, the laptop definitely feels like the future. I just thought the future of computing would be thinner, lighter, and hopefully more affordable. Lenovo says the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 will be available in Q1 of this year, starting at $3,499.