But as well as competing directly, these clashes between titans have manifested themselves collaterally into a series of ideological arguments.
 Take the battle between privacy and progress: Apple, for example, has taken a strict line on using customers’ information, while others are more relaxed, partly because their use of data has allowed them to make great strides in areas such as artificial intelligence.
 Another one of these religious splits has been in the idea of “open” against “closed” systems.
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 The Google Pixel is intended to be a direct competitor to the iPhone (as the frequency of Google’s potshots at Apple during its presentation showed).
 At its heart is the Google Assistant, an artificial intelligence designed to respond to millions of voice queries and demonstrate the power of the company’s smarts.
 google biggest failures It is a rare foray into hardware for Google, which has traditionally left the job of making Android phones to other manufacturers such as Samsung, LG and HTC.
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 It is partly why the company requires that its search engine and web browser be installed on any Android phone that wants to use the Google Play app store, a directive that has landed it in hot water with EU competition regulators.
 The new Google Assistant software that features in the Pixel is a crucial element of the company’s future: computing is moving away from the web searches that make the majority of the company’s money and towards artificial intelligence that can talk and answer questions, so naturally Google is desperate to control this new channel.
 So ask yourself: if you were Google, and needed Assistant to be a success at this crucial juncture, would you leave it to unreliable third parties or take things into your own hands?