Trade show concepts are supposed to be exactly that: concepts. They're half-baked prototypes that barely function, built to capture the attention of as many onlookers as possible so that you'll, hopefully, pay some mind to all the other boring, run-of-the-mill products a particular brand launches. They're never supposed to actually come out. So, when Lenovo revealed earlier this year that its rollable laptop concept would be launching as the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6, alarm bells went off.

I've used enough of these trade show concepts before. I assumed I had the review already done; a conclusion before even cutting open the packing tape. You know what they say about assumptions, though. The ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 is a concept, and I'm not sure that it's the right laptop for most people. But it's easily one of the best-executed concept devices I've used. The gimmick gets your foot in the door, but the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 is a great laptop even without its signature flourish.

Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 pricing and availability

The ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 is expensive, and there's no way around that. Lenovo only offers one model, which clocks in at $3,300 and comes with an Intel Core Ultra 258V complete with Arc 140V graphics and 32GB of on-chip memory, along with a 1TB PCIe 4.0 SSD. Those should be familiar specs if you've taken stock of the market of premium 14-inch laptops, but unlike those designs, I don't suspect we'll see other configurations of the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6. It's possible, but such a unique product surely won't sell like mainstream devices.

The specs are fine, but pricing is an issue. Even Lenovo's tippy-top flagship, the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition, sells for $800 less with the same configuration, while laptops like the Dell Pro 14 Premium come in closer to $2,000. I'm not surprised Lenovo is charging a premium for such a unique device, but I'm surprised the premium is so high. It's anywhere from a $500 to $1,000 premium depending on what device you're looking at, and that's the kind of upcharge that could sway a buying decision.

This is a premium laptop that demands a premium price, absolutely, but it's important to remember that it's still a 14-inch device without a discrete GPU. You don't normally see prices go north of $2,000 without a discrete card. With how Lenovo priced the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6, you have to be sold on the rollable display. It's not just an extra perk for a little more cash — it pushes the laptop into a completely different pricing category.

A premium, rock-solid device

Rollable or not, the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 feels great

If you gave the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 a passing glance, you wouldn't think anything of it. It looks like your run-of-the-mill, premium 14-inch laptop, at least from a distance. It's a touch thinker and a full pound heavier than something like the Asus Zenbook 14, but Lenovo does an excellent job hiding the bulk here. There are design compromises, make no mistake, but they're not so glaring as to distract from the fact that the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 is a well-built, premium 14-inch laptop.

Let's address those compromises first, though. In addition to more heft overall, there's an extremely thick bezel around the screen. With the screen down, the display has a 5:4 aspect ratio, so it's longer on the vertical side. That's despite the fact that the laptop is longer horizontally. Without the screen extended, it creates this odd mismatch with the bezels, but it never went beyond the point of being mildly distracting. Once you actually start using the laptop, it feels exactly like, well, using any other laptop.

The more practical concession comes with the hinge. The ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 is constructed out of aluminum, and it feels extremely rigid, especially in the hinge. That's a good thing for a top-heavy design like this. However, due to the rolling screen, you can only push the display back so far. It extends back maybe 15 or 20 degrees past the half-way point. It's a little disappointing to me as someone who likes to use a laptop in my lap, with the screen pushed back and angled up toward my eyes, but I understand the design change.

For ports, you don't get much. Lenovo includes two USB-C connections on the left side of the laptop, right next to each other, and both support Thunderbolt 4 with power delivery and DisplayPort Alt mode. Dual USB-C connections are all you really need, but I'll never argue with a spare USB-A port, especially on a laptop like this where there's a little extra thickness already.

One flexible OLED

A goregous panel with a useful party trick

Flexible displays aren't just exciting because they're novel. That certainly helps, but the panels we've seen on foldables, and now the first rollable, stand out because they're OLED. You might expect a flexible screen to come with terrible color and no hope of usable brightness, all slathered in a thick layer of protective plastic, but that's not the case at all with the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6. The screen looks incredible, both in its quality, and how little Lenovo sacrificed to keep the screen safe.

By the numbers, everything checks out. Highlights can reach just short of 500 nits, color is excellent both in accuracy and coverage, and contrast is mathematically infinite. You even get a 120Hz refresh rate, which I was happy to find out works regardless of how the screen is set up, along with a high resolution. It's 2,000 x 1,600 rolled in and 2,000 x 2,350 extended. There's no neat resolution I can point to for context, but it's somewhere north of 1440p, which offers great pixel density on a 14-inch laptop.

That's all good, but the rollable aspect of the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 is what's important. There's a dedicated button on the keyboard that will extend the screen up or shrink it back down, or you can use a gesture with your hand in front of the webcam. By default, a small window occupies the newly-exposed area of the screen, showing you things like your to-do list and calendar, which are pulled directly from Windows. Lenovo also offers a virtual monitor, allowing you to use a portion of the screen as a secondary display. I don't care for this mode — PowerToys on a single display is a better option — but it works.

What stood out to me most was how seamless this odd resolution is for Windows. It's clear that Microsoft and Lenovo worked together on this laptop, as Windows snaps to the new layout instantly without breaking the UI — I count that as a win for Windows 11. The mechanical portion of rolling the screen up is great, too. There's a faint mechanical buzz as the screen rolls up or down, but it's silky smooth. I'm worried about the longevity of this mechanism simply due to what it does, but I have nothing but confidence in Lenovo's implementation. Even rolling the screen up or down feels premium, just like the rest of the device.

Surprise — Lenovo made a good laptop keyboard

In other news, summer ends in September

The ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 doesn't need to be more than a laptop with a rollable screen, but it's so impressive because it's a solid laptop despite the rollable screen. That shows up clearly with the keyboard and trackpad, which are among the best I've used. Lenovo has made a name for itself when it comes to laptop keyboards, and for good reason. You get the same excellent keyboard here that's available in the Lenovo Yoga 9i, which has a bit more travel than a MacBook Pro, all while retaining a snappy, feather-light feel.

That's expected, but the haptic trackpad is exciting. Lenovo is one of the few companies putting out Windows laptops with haptic trackpads, and I'm happy the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 is one of the designs to get the haptic treatment. I'd dare say it's as good as the trackpad on the MacBook Air, which remains my favorite on the market.

Lunar Lake still lasts all day

Though, you're missing some H-series grunt

As mentioned, the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 only comes in a single configuration at the time of writing, and at the heart of the machine is an Intel Core Ultra 7 258V. It's not a particularly powerful chip, and it comes from a generation of CPUs known better for their efficiency than peak power. Still, you're getting a very capable NPU, some decent multi-threaded grunt, and surprisingly potent graphics based on Intel's Battlemage architecture.

For lightly-threaded workloads, the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 does the job. And with access to 32GB of on-board memory, 16GB of which can be allocated to the GPU, you can even run a lot of creative apps without much issue. Anything beyond that is where the laptop can run into a problem. As you can see from the results below, Intel's H-series chips provide more power (literally), and they're a go-to option in thin-and-light laptops like the Asus Zenbook 14. The Dell Pro 14 Premium with its V-series chip is more in-line with the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6, though it still edges out a slight lead.

Although this isn't a gaming laptop, I usually run a few 3DMark tests to showcase the graphics capabilities of a device, but I wasn't able to with the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6. They crashed immediately. After looking into it, there appears to be some background task controlling the resolution of the display, which is operating at all times. I tried manually closing these processes, but I wasn't able to get the test to run. That means no 3DMark results, but it's also a warning about full-screen applications in general. In the few I tried, I didn't run into issues, but I suspect there are at least some apps that won't play nicely with whatever is taking control of the resolution.

I tried a few games, mostly to see what they'd be like on such a unique aspect ratio. The one game that stood out is Star of Providence, which is a vertical shoot 'em up that feels like it was made for this type of display. It's a niche application, but games like Downwell and Ikaruga are incredible on the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6. Almost every other full-screen application, however, will introduce black bars in some way. That's just the nature of the beast when you venture too far away from 16:9.

Although Lenovo opted for a more conservative chip in the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 and restricted peak performance in the process, the upside is solid battery life. With a 66Whr battery, I got close to 11 hours of battery life in PCMark 10's battery life test, which is great. Expect that number to drop quite a bit if you're rolling the screen a lot, though. Even better, the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 charges via USB-C, and it supports fast charging, with 80% capacity in an hour if you're using at least a 65W adapter.

Should you buy the Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6?

You should buy the Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 if:

• You want one of the best keyboard and trackpad combos on the market.
• You need a lot of screen space for multitasking.
• You don't mind the odd look in public when you unroll the screen.

You should NOT buy the Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 if:

• You need peak portability.
• You're not 100% sold on the rollable OLED.
• You're need more CPU grunt or a discrete GPU.

The ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 earns some criticism, no doubt. It's expensive, the battery life is great, but the CPU power isn't, and the build is both thicker and heavier than other devices in this class. But I'm willing to overlook all of those issues because what is here is damn good, and it really doesn't have any right to be.

This is supposed to be a concept, a CES gimmick that was never built to withstand day-to-day use. And yet, here we are. The ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 doesn't feel like a gimmick. It's a surprisingly realized product that, although expensive, manages to deliver both a unique design and a fantastic laptop under one roof.