Lenovo Makes Rollable OLED Screens a Laptop Reality

At CES 2025, Lenovo won the race to deliver something various companies have teased for years but never took beyond a prototype: A rollable OLED laptop with an expanding display.

The Lenovo Lenovo’s ThinkBook Plus Gen 6, the first rollable OLED laptop, debuts at CES 2025. looks and feels like a typical 14-inch Windows laptop at a glance but, with the touch of a button on the keyboard, a motor rolls out the full OLED panel, expanding the display’s surface by 50 percent.

Rollable OLED concepts have toured conferences before. Mobile World Congress saw the debut of several concepts, including the Tecno Phantom Ultimate, which promised rollable OLED for phones. The ThinkBook Plus Gen 6, however, isn’t a concept. Lenovo says it will arrive at retail in the first quarter of 2025.

“Unique engineering” makes rollable laptop possible

Lenovo isn’t new to flexible OLED displays. It released the first foldable OLED laptop, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold, in 2020 (and it’s still available). The X1 Fold used flexible OLED to deliver an ultra-portable form factor that could provide a 16-inch display but, when folded, was much smaller than even a 13-inch laptop.

The ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 takes the opposite approach. The rollable OLED display isn’t meant to make the device more portable than it looks but, instead, to provide a much larger display when it’s required.

“You may have seen rollable concepts before, but those concepts were outward folding, and more in a smartphone or tablet form factor. This is a little different. It’s rolling through the hinge into the base,” says Samuel Shang, principal researcher at Lenovo.

Shang explains the rollable mechanism, which is found at the hinge and driven by a motor inside the laptop, expands or retracts the rollable OLED display into the chassis of the laptop and beneath the keyboard.

While it’s not obvious by looking at the laptop, this means the OLED display is both foldable and rollable. The rolling mechanism extends and retracts the display but, when the display is retracted, it must also fold whenever the laptop is opened or closed. Shang says Lenovo invested in “unique engineering” to sandwich the display’s many layers, which include not only the OLED material itself but also polarizers, the touchscreen, and the electrical backplane powering the display, into a package that allowed this flexibility.

All this flexing and rolling means reliability is a question, as is true of all flexible displays. “We designed the display to ensure it can support being rolled 20,000 times,” says Shang. “And that doesn’t mean that after 20,000, something will be wrong. But we have tested it for up to that.” The display was tested with automated equipment at Lenovo’s Yamato Labs.

The display was also tested to endure up to 30,000 folds. That’s an important number for Lenovo, as it’s the same specification to which the company tests the conventional laptop hinges found on its other commercial laptops.

It’s practical, but it’ll cost you

Rolling aside, the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6’s OLED display offers performance that’s in-line with OLED panels on competing Windows laptops. It has a contrast ratio beyond 1,000,000:1, a maximum brightness of up to 400 nits, and displays 100 percent of the DCI-P3 color gamut. It also has a maximum refresh rate of up to 120 hertz.

There’s no surprises inside, either. The ThinkBook equips Intel’s latest Core Ultra Series 2 processors, which include up to 32GB of on-package RAM, Intel Arc Xe 2 integrated graphics, and an NPU. The rolling mechanism does add a bit of weight, but it still tips the scales at under four pounds.

While all of this typical for a new laptop in 2025, but it’s notable that Lenovo can make room for this hardware alongside the rolling display. Lenovo’s X1 Fold, by contrast, had to get by with entry-level Intel Core 12th-gen processors and just 16GB of RAM, a problem which took some shine off its otherwise unique design.

That’s not to say the world’s first laptop with a rolling display comes without a caveat, however, because there’s a big one: the price. Lenovo says the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 will start at US $3,499 when it hits stores in the first quarter of 2025. That’s steep, no doubt, though not unexpected for a laptop boasting unique display technology. If rollable OLED finds an audience, future iterations of the laptop are sure to offer lower pricing as the years roll on.