At CES 2026, Lenovo is announcing yet another new concept laptop with a transforming screen: the ThinkPad Rollable XD Concept. It’s a ThinkPad, complete with its iconic red TrackPoint nub, but it features a flexible OLED display that wraps around to the outer part of its lid. Slide your finger along the folded spin of its touchscreen, and the laptop vertically expands from a 13.3-inch display to a taller 15.9-inch screen — offering more screen real estate for productivity work. It’s a bit like Lenovo’s already released ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 rollable, but the screen and motors are all in the lid as opposed to tucking the display into the chassis.
By wrapping the screen around the lid, you get a bit of usable exterior-facing workspace. When closed, the ThinkPad XD can display touch-friendly widgets on its lid. And giving it a knock will extend the display slightly, lengthening the lid to make opening it easier. The glass covering the outward-facing touchscreen and curved spine at the top of the lid is made of Corning Gorilla Glass Victus 2, and the seethrough portion of the lid showcases the mechanics of the rollable screen.
It’s genuinely fun to expand and contract the XD concept’s screen, seeing the inner motors and pulleys at work and changing the shape of the laptop. After seeing the XD at a brief in-person demo, I think every rollable device should have at least some seethrough components.
Since Lenovo made the rollable ThinkBook that actually hit the market, it’s been toying with other concepts that could bring shapeshifting screens to a wider audience. The ThinkBook Flip concept removed the costly mechanics and motors of the rollable and instead had you manually fold the display over itself. The ThinkBook VertiFlex Concept simply allowed you to turn its display to achieve a taller vertical orientation. Both of these concepts could theoretically cost less than the $3,300 rollable that’s on sale now.
The ThinkPad XD concept could take that a step further, as the rolling assembly is fully contained within the lid. When presenting it, a Lenovo rep told me “In an ideal world, this would be a panel option” you could configure a run-of-the-mill ThinkPad with. We’ll have to see if that day ever comes, or if the XD even gets a standalone release of its own. Lenovo is light on other details about the XD Concept (like chip details, specs, etc.), but the company keeps putting all kinds of concepts out into the world, and a decent amount of them are slowly seeing real releases.
Photography by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge
