Why we need MAC address?

Media Access Control Addresses

Coming to layer two of the OSI model we have MAC Address which is in the physical layer, now remember IP Address in layer three (network layer).
MAC stands for Media Access Control and that is identified as ether in ifconfig as we can see in the photo below, we can think of that as physical address and the way that we communicate when we using switches.

Switches communicate of this physical Address this is kind of how they know what devices are what, Assum that you build your computer and you installed your network interface card (NIC) you are going to plug that in and you will have MAC address for that NIC, even your smartphone has MAC Address anything that uses network interface is used MAC Address.

MAC Address is important because utilize layer two or switching and how we communicate over switches, now as we can see the MAC address has six different pairs of two 00:0c:29:23:f8:5e, if we take the first three pairs and will try to put it in MAC address lookup will get to know the vendor is Vmware.

So the first three pairs here are identifiers and we can identify what will up against, if you looked at your house and you look at your network and tried to fine a device you will see the IP address, but the IP address does not really help you identify what device is that. in that case, you can see the MAC address and you can identify it by that.
This is a quick way to lookup devices and knows about them.