Lenovo’s ThinkBook VertiFlex Concept Laptop Has a Swiveling Screen

Lenovo isn’t shy about trying new things. Last year, the PC maker teased a concept laptop with a transparent screen^[1]. Earlier this year, the ThinkBook Flip concept^[2] employed a flexible OLED display that folded over the top of the laptop lid, ready to flip up whenever you needed the extra screen space. At CES 2025, we saw a ThinkBook with a rollable OLED screen^[3] that expanded upward automatically at the touch of a button—this one is a real product^[4] you can actually buy^[5].

Get ready for another whacky concept. At IFA 2025, the tech exhibition in Berlin, Lenovo unveiled its latest idea: the Lenovo ThinkBook VertiFlex. This is a laptop with a screen that can manually swivel from a standard horizontal orientation to vertical.

Portrait Mode

By default, the ThinkBook VertiFlex Concept looks like a normal 14-inch laptop^[6]. Look closely at the screen’s edge, however, and you’ll see a second layer jutting out; that’s the actual screen. Grab the right corner edge of the screen and push it upward, and the display will smoothly swivel up into a vertical orientation.

The back panel the screen is mounted on has a felt backing to keep everything smooth and scratch-free, and you can even prop a phone up here in this orientation. There’s a mechanism inside that manages the motion and keeps it operating smoothly. Despite this, the PC is still fairly slim at 17.9 mm, and it weighs roughly 3 pounds. (The 14-inch MacBook Pro^[7] is around 15 mm thick and weighs 3.4 pounds.)

I use a dual-screen setup with one vertical monitor next to my main ultrawide monitor^[8] at home. Having a vertical screen is a game-changer, as it’s perfect for applications that utilize more vertical space. Email is a great example, so are apps like Slack, anything to do with PDFs, and even most word processing software. But I’ve yet to change my screen orientation in the middle of a workflow.