You are still licensed the operating system and end user software from a separate company or companies. Which means the reduction of tech to JUST the software is still extremely crass.
Said another way, the dependency graph is bidirectional. Software requires hardware to run. Hardware is of no practical use without software. The fixed quantity is the "use case", NOT the software.
most hardware i use in my life, outside the laptop I use to write this comment or my phone, works pretty good without complicated software. Heck, even my cars are old enough to have some basic embedded software running the engine only.
Also, software without hardware to run on, or to write n, is even more pointless than hardware alone. At least the latter can be touched.
Said another way, the dependency graph is bidirectional. Software requires hardware to run. Hardware is of no practical use without software. The fixed quantity is the "use case", NOT the software.