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We saw laptops that fold And rolling laptopsbut what about a running laptop? The latest from Lenovo strange notebook design soon to become a real product you can buy is a new ThinkBook with a swivel display. In a version of a beleaguered coder’s worst nightmare, the laptop screen can follow you no matter how far you try to walk around your desk.
Previewed on Gizmodo for CES 2026The $1,650 ThinkBook Plus Gen 7 Auto Twist uses a hinge that can rotate along a horizontal and vertical axis. Besides face tracking with its webcam, the laptop can track your movements as you pace around a meeting or lounge in your chair, watch Netflix, and ignore all the pings you get on Slack. The Auto Twist is expected to be available from June this year.
In person, the rotation mechanism is almost silent and somewhat eerie in the way it can follow your body when you try to move out of frame. The only problem with my demo came from positioning two people in the frame at once. The Auto Twist would become confused and follow one person or another despite its proximity to the laptop. It was the same problem with Lenovo’s Intelligent Motion Concept laptop stand, although the ThinkBook is much more mobile than that massive brick of a device.
Despite the strange contraption that allows the screen to rotate, you’re not sacrificing much in favor of a concept becoming reality. The new 14-inch ThinkBook comes with a 2.8K OLED display offering a refresh rate of up to 120Hz. It features a Intel Core Ultra 3 Series processor inside with options for a chip with 12 Xe3 GPU cores. The extra GPU headroom could be useful if you intend to make this laptop a portable workstation for some light graphics tasks.
As if that wasn’t enough, Lenovo is also planning a revised version of its ThinkBook Gen 6 Rollable Laptop starting in 2025. The new ThinkPad Rollable XD is another concept device designed for Lenovo’s long-running business laptops, but with a twist. It still has a flexible 14-inch display that extends just north of 16 inches vertically. While the ThinkBook uses a mechanism to insert the screen into the body of the laptop, the ThinkPad uses a multitude of carbon fiber cables and pulleys to slide the screen into the laptop’s lid. There is a piece of clear plastic on top to protect the most sensitive part of the folded screen.
Placing the flexible display into the lid has a few advantages. First, it keeps the chassis available for the kind of high-end specs and cooling gear you want in a pint-sized laptop. Second, the collapsing screen then becomes a secondary half-display on the back. Lenovo showed how this could be used for alerts and updates when the lid is closed or to show video to people looking on the other side of your laptop.
This concept isn’t quite an actual product yet. The rolling and twisted ThinkBooks proved that Lenovo is ready to make these strange products a reality. Sure, you might not need these laptops, but at least Lenovo is staying ahead of the curve by keeping the old laptop design up to date.
Gizmodo is on the ground in Las Vegas all week bringing you everything you need to know about the technology revealed at CES 2026. You can follow our CES live blog here And find all our coverage here.
