Last year, Lenovo teased a rollable laptop at MWC 2023, but it was purely a prototype. Now, a leak covered by The Verge from Evan Blass claims that the concept is becoming a reality and will be released at CES 2025 in just a few weeks.
The concept Lenovo laptop from last year looks like a completely normal laptop at first, but once you press a button on the side, more screen literally starts rolling out from under the keyboard. The screen slowly grows until you have basically two laptop screens stacked on top of each other.
The transition was pretty slow, and you can see a slight crease when the screen is fully extended, but we have no idea if these quirks are limited to the prototype. Judging by the leaked photos, some changes have definitely been made.
If you look at the bottom of the device, you can see the leaked commercial product has a much more standard-looking hinge than the prototype.
The leak doesn’t mention any specs, but the prototype had a screen resolution of 2024 x 2368 when fully extended, and it looks like a vertical display. In a world of ultrawide displays and huge monitors, there are plenty of people who are starting to struggle with the compact form factor of laptops — so Lenovo’s experiments are definitely welcomed by many.
Whether this product will be durable and practical enough to catch on is another story. Blass is a well-regarded leaker with lots of accurate leaks under his belt, so we can probably expect to find out more about this product next month at CES 2025.
Different companies are known for different patterns — Apple has a reputation for only releasing products once the tech is close to perfect, and Lenovo has a reputation for, well, kind of the opposite. Every year, Lenovo throws wacky new PC products at the market to see what people are interested in and see how well a new idea catches on.
In 2020, for example, it released the ThinkPad X1 Fold — which is just a giant OLED display that can fold in half like a laptop and be used with a separate keyboard. Last year, the company even launched a second generation of the product. There’s also been a experiments like the ThinkBook Plus Gen 4 with the built-in e-ink screen on the lid or the ThinkBook Plus Gen 5, which can be converted into an Android tablet.
We’ve also seen foldable phones and other devices for quite a while now, so even for people who don’t use them, the idea is becoming fairly normal. Rollable devices, however, take us right back into unknown territory.