That particular thing is part of Strangerville and all sims, including your playables, will pull a laptop out of thin air when you are at the SV library. Mostly, I see it happen at the picnic tables in front of the library there. And when the sims get up, the laptops will disappear. I don't use the libraries very much and haven't noticed it happening outside of SV though. Not to say that it isn't, just that I haven't seen it.
Hope this helps.
If you saw it without having SV installed, then what may have happened is that laptops were added to the base game in a patch before SV was released. I do remember that prior to SV, there were no laptops in the game. As I got SV when it came out, I'm not sure if that happened or not. What I see when they show up at the library in SV is they are the ones that came with that pack. But DU did add more laptops to the game but those are different and I can't ever remember seeing one of those at the library in SV.
Hope this helps.
