What is the difference between an adapter and a network interface?

Question

Having difficulty understanding the MSDN documentation on IP Assistant features . What is the difference between an adapter and a network interface?

Answer 1

An “adapter” is part of the equipment.

A “network interface” is a software design.

Typically, there is one network interface for each adapter.

But there may be network interfaces that are not connected to the adapter.

And for each adapter there can be several interfaces.

Answer 2

MSDN docs are quite large. Here is a quote from the "Managing Interfaces" section that can help clear the situation:

There is a one-to-one correspondence between the interfaces and adapters of a given computer. An interface is an abstraction of an IP layer, whereas an adapter is an abstraction of data.