[MUSIC PLAYING] INSTRUCTOR: Hardware and software, two terms you've probably heard of at one point or another. The odds are high that you use both on a daily basis, whether it's with your smartphone or personal computer. Let's take a deeper look at what these two things are, and why they're important. 

Hardware is any element of a computer that's physical. This includes things like monitors, keyboards, and also the insides of devices, like microchips and hard drives. Software is anything that tells hardware what to do, and how to do it, including computer programs and apps on your phone. So video games, photo editors, and web browsers are just a few examples. 

Hardware and software are very different from each other, but they also need one another in order to function. Let's look at an example of this using a smartphone. 

In this case, the hardware would be the physical phone itself, and the software would be its operating system and its apps. If we were to take away the software, we would just have a dead phone in our hands. It wouldn't be able to make calls, text, or go online, because it's not receiving any kind of instructions. 

On the other hand, let's say we have no hardware. Meaning, there's no actual phone. If all we have are the programs, we just have a bunch of instructions, but nothing to give those instructions to. 

So the big picture here is that hardware needs software to tell it what to do, but software also needs hardware in order to act out its directions. 

Technology will continue to evolve, and though we may not be sure of how things will look in, say, 100 years, this combination, of hardware and software, will be there, serving as its foundation. 

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