Lenovo's transparent laptop lets you see through the screen — and draw on the keyboard

At MWC 2024 in Barcelona, Lenovo unveiled the ThinkBook Transparent Display Laptop Concept: a 17.3-inch notebook with a bezel-less Micro-LED screen you can literally see through. With pixels off, the panel is up to 55% transparent; with pixels lit it climbs to a 1,000-nit opaque white. Lenovo called it a look at how AI PCs could blend digital and physical environments.

The concept's real trick was the deck. What looks like a flat touch keyboard is a projection that disappears when a stylus comes near, leaving a screen-less drawing surface — Lenovo's pitch was that an artist or architect could trace the world behind the laptop instead of working from a photo. A rear camera also ran object recognition, overlaying AI-generated elements on objects placed behind the display: sunflowers were identified and a butterfly appeared on screen.

Lenovo was explicit that this was a proof of concept with no release plan. ThinkPad product head Tom Butler said he had "very high confidence" its technologies would reach a real laptop within five years, and that the point was to start a public conversation about what transparent displays could be useful for. Reviewers found the projected keyboard finicky and the use cases niche, but the conversation Lenovo wanted did happen — across tech press worldwide.