The ThinkBook Plus Rollable is not about its performance, though Lenovo made a good choice in using the Intel Core Ultra 258V. Or so I thought. This is an efficient chip that gets solid performance, but more importantly, it usually gets great battery life. Not the case on this ThinkBook.
There are a few things Lenovo does to make the ThinkBook Plus Rollable last longer on a charge out of the box. By default, HDR is turned off and the refresh rate is set to 60 Hz instead of 120. The power settings are also set to Best Power Efficiency on battery rather than Balanced. It’s not that those are bad settings necessarily, but they skew the numbers when you test the battery life compared to other machines. Using the normal settings I test on, the ThinkBook Plus Rollable lasted 10 hours in local video playback and considerably less in real-world applications and tasks. You can get a couple more hours by lowering these settings, but that’s true of just about any laptop.
Photograph: Luke Larsen
Performance was about as expected for this chip. It’s not nearly as fast as Apple’s M4, in either single-core or multi-core performance, but that’s not Lenovo’s fault. One of the strongest aspects of this Intel chip is its integrated graphics performance, and here the ThinkBook Plus Rollable delivers expected results, allowing you to play some lower-tier games like Fortnite or Marvel Rivals at decent frame rates, so long as you’re willing to drop graphics settings to Medium and use upscaling as necessary.
There’s just one configuration available, and it happens to be a stacked model, coming with 32 GB of RAM and 1 TB of storage. That’s nice to have, but it’s partly what makes this laptop so expensive. For what this machine is meant to do, which is basic work and multitasking, 32 GB of RAM isn’t necessary.
Lenovo knows there’s just one reason someone would buy a laptop like this. For fun. It’s got that geeky, gadget appeal that so few pieces of modern tech still have. Buy this thing, and you’ll want to show off the transformation just to see the look on people’s faces. And once that excitement wears off, you’ll still have a laptop that is both premium and immensely useful. That’s what separates gimmicks from innovation.
