We’ve seen laptops that fold and laptops that roll, but what about a laptop that spins? Lenovo’s latest weird notebook design that’s soon to become an actual product you can buy is a new ThinkBook with a screen on a pivot. In a version of a beleaguered coder’s worst nightmare, the laptop’s screen can follow you no matter how far you try to scurry around your desk.
Previewed to Gizmodo for CES 2026, the $1,650 ThinkBook Plus Gen 7 Auto Twist uses a hinge that can rotate along a horizontal and vertical axis. Alongside face tracking with its webcam, the laptop can follow your movements when you’re pacing during a meeting or lounging back in your chair, watching Netflix and ignoring all the pings you’re getting on Slack. The Auto Twist should be available starting in June this year.
In person, the spinning mechanism is near-silent and somewhat eerie for how well it can track your body as you try to maneuver out of frame. The one issue with my demo stemmed from positioning two people in the frame at once. The Auto Twist grew confused and would follow one person or another despite how close they were to the laptop. It was the same problem with Lenovo’s Smart Motion Concept laptop holder, though the ThinkBook is far more mobile than that massive brick of a device.
Despite the odd contraption that lets the display pivot, you’re not sacrificing much for the sake of a concept-made-reality. The new 14-inch ThinkBook comes with a 2.8K OLED display that sports up to a 120Hz refresh rate. It features an Intel Core Ultra Series 3 processor inside with options for a chip with 12 Xe3 GPU cores. The extra GPU headroom could be handy if you intend to make this laptop a portable workstation for some lightweight graphics tasks.
If that wasn’t enough, Lenovo is also considering a revised version of its ThinkBook Gen 6 Rollable laptop from 2025. The new ThinkPad Rollable XD is another concept device built for Lenovo’s long-standing business-oriented laptops, though with a twist. It still features a 14-inch flexible screen that extends to just north of 16 inches vertically. Whereas the ThinkBook uses a mechanism to feed the screen into the laptop body, the ThinkPad uses a host of carbon fiber cables and pulleys to drag the display into the laptop lid. There’s a piece of clear plastic on the top to protect the folded display’s most sensitive part.
Putting the flexible display in the lid has a few benefits. One, it keeps the chassis available for the kind of higher-end specs and cooling apparatus you want for a pint-sized laptop. Two, the collapsing screen then becomes a secondary half-display on the back. Lenovo showed how this could be used for alerts and updates while you have the lid closed or to show off a video to people looking on the opposite side of your laptop.
That concept isn’t quite a real-life product yet. The rolling and twisting ThinkBooks have proved that Lenovo is willing to make these oddball products a reality. Sure, you may not have use for these laptops, but at least Lenovo’s staying at the front of keeping the old, staid laptop design fresh.
Gizmodo is on the ground in Las Vegas all week bringing you everything you need to know about the tech unveiled at CES 2026. You can follow our CES live blog here and find all our coverage here.
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