Samsung has a crazy plan for its foldable display tech – laptops might never look the same again

It's fair to say that when you look at the most popular laptops on the market right now, there isn't quite as much crazy innovation going on as you might be able to spy in, for example, the folding phone sector. Most of these computers are still two slabs that fold together, with a keyboard and display in between.

Now, though, it looks like Samsung might be taking some inspiration from its success in folding phones, with a new patent suggesting it might be looking to bring that tech to its laptops in an interesting way. As spotted by 91mobiles, it actually filed a patent way back in 2020 that shows a novel idea of how to use folding displays in a laptop.

Rather than making the entire laptop a foldable display, it instead focuses on the very top of the laptop's screen, which effectively becomes a foldable flap of display. By default it can fold all the way back and effectively just become a strip of display that you can see even when your laptop is closed.

This could show notifications or alerts, as well as the time and other information, and could also house high-quality cameras. When the laptop's open, though, you could fold it up to effectively extend the screen upwards by a small amount, and those cameras would be pointing at you for webcam use as needed.

That's a pretty different way of looking at a laptop, and there's no real indication that Samsung has carried this forward into an actual device that it's building up toward releasing. Still, it's fascinating to imagine how it could work.

For one thing, we'd assume that this would involve a high-quality camera setup, which might contribute to a pretty huge price tag, hypothetically, given that the folding display itself would also add to the manufacturing cost. Whether there's any real benefit to having cameras that can point forward is also debatable in the laptop form factor.

Regardless, we can sit back and keep an eye out for the next couple of years to see if Samsung ever makes something of this. If it does, you have to ask whether it could become a feature that all the best laptops start to imitate.