Unveiled at Mobile World Congress, Lenovo’s ThinkBook Transparent Display Laptop Concept is the industry’s first laptop with a 17.3-inch Micro-LED transparent display, providing a completely borderless and see-through display experience.
Featuring a limitless screen, a transparent keyboard section, and a design that gives the impression of a levitating footpad, this device embodies a futuristic simplicity, significantly enhancing the user experience.
The genius of this laptop resides in its seamless fusion of the digital and physical realms. Leveraging Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC), its transparent screen paves the way for collaboration and productivity, by facilitating interaction with tangible objects and superimposing digital data to produce unique content created by users. This transparency enables the device to blend effortlessly into any setting. The transition between the keyboard and a drawing surface is smooth, thanks to pen support, heralding a new era of creative possibilities. The integration of AI with transparent screens is set to revolutionise data engagement and application use, inspiring the development of innovative features and designs.
The use of Micro-LED technology brings numerous benefits to the creation of transparent displays. Its high colour saturation, contrast, and brightness of 1,000 nits ensure clear visibility in both indoor and outdoor environments, making it versatile for various contexts. This technology also holds the promise of future enhancements in image quality, longevity, and adjustable transparency, allowing for greater privacy or increased interaction with the physical world. The capacity for displaying videos and dynamic images enables the transparent screen to integrate seamlessly with its environment.
The Lenovo ThinkBook Transparent Display Laptop Concept goes beyond being a mere prototype; it offers a glimpse into the future of AI-powered computers, merging digital and physical spaces in ways that could dramatically transform user experiences.
Innovating for sustainability and repairability
Lenovo is also embracing a circular economy model, focusing on innovation across its supply chain, product design, and service offerings. This approach is centred around a ‘design, use, return, re-use’ philosophy, encouraging the disassembly and recycling of products. The company is committed to incorporating closed-loop recycled plastic into its products, with a target to recycle 800 million pounds of end-of-life products by the 2025-2026 fiscal year. Furthermore, Lenovo aims to incorporate 300 million pounds of post-consumer recycled content plastics into their products and enhance the sustainability of their packaging.
The ThinkPad laptops are designed with sustainability in mind, from inception through to disposal, utilising recycled materials in their construction to ensure responsible sourcing and waste reduction. These laptops are also built to last, with design features that facilitate easy repair and upgrade, thus prolonging their lifespan.
In a notable advancement, the ThinkPad T14 Gen 5 and T16 Gen 3 models have been developed in collaboration with the iFixit Solutions team to enhance their repairability. These models now extend customer replaceable units (CRUs) to include batteries with cable-free connectors and offer a fully socketed DIMM design for SSD and WWAN replacements. Additionally, visual indicators have been introduced to simplify the repair process. Lenovo, with assistance from the iFixit team, has produced new repair guides, complete with video instructions for all CRU parts, and has made these parts more accessible for ordering. These initiatives not only extend the lifespan of the products but also significantly reduce electronic waste and provide cost benefits for both businesses and individual consumers. As a testament to these improvements, the ThinkPad T14 Gen 5 and T16 Gen 3 have been awarded a provisional iFixit repairability score of 9.3 out of 10.
“This is a major step forward for Lenovo and the technology industry. Making laptops that stand the test of time is essential to building a sustainable electronics industry. It’s not easy, and Lenovo is demonstrating that repairability and innovation go hand-in-hand,” said Kyle Wiens, CEO at iFixit.
