Lenovo's Twisting Laptop Follows You Around the Meeting Room
Lenovo's latest innovation is a laptop that twists and turns with you, quite literally. Imagine a meeting room where the laptop's display adjusts to follow your movements, just like a personal assistant. This isn't science fiction; it's the ThinkBook Plus Gen 7 Auto Twist, a workplace-ready device that's set to revolutionize the way we interact with laptops. But here's where it gets controversial: while the concept is intriguing, some may question the practicalities of such a design.
The ThinkBook Plus Gen 7 Auto Twist is a twist on Lenovo's previous designs, like the 2012 Lenovo ThinkPad Twist. However, this year's twist is all about AI. The screen doesn't just twist manually; it's motorized and uses the camera to follow you as you move around the laptop, much like Apple's Center Stage tech. This feature is particularly useful in meeting rooms, where the laptop can adjust to show presentations or other materials without the need for manual adjustments.
The laptop was first unveiled as a concept device at CES 2024, and it's now ready for commercial sale in June 2026, with a starting price of $1,650. The design has remained largely unchanged, but Lenovo claims that the new version rotates faster and more quietly. At Lenovo's showcase area at CES 2026, I saw the Gen 7 Auto Twist in action, and it was impressive. The display rotated to follow me, and the AI-powered mode with two large kewpie eyes gave the laptop a surprisingly companionable personality.
The Gen 7 Auto Twist is positioned as a lightweight (just over 3 pounds) work laptop rather than a powerful machine, running Intel Core Ultra Series 3 processors. Its 14-inch 2.8K OLED display is sharp but not particularly bright (500 nits), making it suitable for indoor use. The laptop is designed to respond to voice commands, but the noisy demo floor made some of them hard to hear. Despite this, the laptop is set to be a game-changer for meeting rooms and collaborative work.
The Gen 7 Auto Twist is just one of many laptops Lenovo showed off at CES 2026, including the ThinkPad Rollable XD Concept laptop with a screen that rises vertically and the Legion Pro Rollable laptop concept, intended for gamers to expand their display horizontally for better gaming on the go. While Lenovo hasn't shared when or if these devices will be made into commercial versions, the success of the Gen 7 Auto Twist suggests that we could see more innovative designs in the future. But will these rollable laptops live up to the hype? That's a question for the comments.
