Napster Is (Sort of) Back With Something They Call a Hologram

I love days like this, when something comes completely out of left field to baffle and confuse and excite us. This time it’s the rebirth—no, the outright reanimation—of the dead, corpsefied Napster risen to inflict even more AI upon us in the form of a clip-on screen for your computer.

Using the name Napster is an obvious grab at Millennials’ nostalgia for the Y2K-era music streaming platform. The View has nothing to do with music whatsoever. Why saddle it with the Napster name?

Gens Z and Alpha never used Napster, so that’s a bust for those two consumer bases. If Napster has the same sort of retro cachet that Sony Walkman and Playboy have partially regained lately, I’m unaware of it.

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Napster

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Available at Napster

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why?

Napster’s website says the View, which sits atop your Mac’s monitor (the app is for Macs only), offers “thousands of (AI) specialists who stop procrastination, fix bugs, prep interviews, build prototypes, decode taxes, and make you unstoppable.”

Whichever one you choose shows a circular screen with a bust of the AI’s avatar, who interacts with you. That’s it. Napster calls it a hologram, but that’s not a hologram. A hologram is a projection. This is just a small screen that happens to be a circle.

I’m honestly baffled. We’ve already got a number of fairly capable—as capable as they can be in 2025—generative AIs on the market: OpenAI ChatGPT, Perplexity AI, Anthropic Claude, and Google Gemini, to name a few.

Diversification is great, but with everybody out there trying to make their own competing AI service, it feels more like fragmentation, shards of the market raining down from every direction. Does anyone really want to be wrapped up in more of them, especially while Apple Intelligence and Amazon Alexa+ are closing in on us from the other direction?

Most of all, I’ve never heard the criticism from anybody, even a stranger online, that a problem with AI is that it does have a face, particularly a face that can exist outside of your computer screen.

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Napster