"Network switches are simple devices" oh I am so sorry. Hubs were simple devices. Switches are alarmingly smart devices even if they don't handle VLANs or support STP (and almost everyone wants them to support Spanning Tree Protocol, to stop loops). Your switch has onboard packet buffering, understands Ethernet addresses, often generates its own traffic and responds to network traffic (see STP), and is actually a (layer 2) high speed router with a fallback to being a hub.