Rogue01

macOS Yosemite and iOS 8 in 2014 with continuity and handoff already let you use your Mac to make and receive calls with your iPhone.  You could even answer and make calls with your iPad too.  This isn’t new.  I guess they made the Phone app to dumb it down for people?  

jonro said:

I think this means that macOS or iOS will pass Dolby Atmos directly to Sonos speakers. Anyway, I hope so. 

No.  This is HDMI passthrough for an AV receiver to handle the processing, not a Sonos speaker over WiFi.

williamlondon said:

This is interesting, would HomePods do anything different to the signal they receive now when they output? Wonder if this means they might take advantage of it with their own existing products, or introduce new products that will?? Fun times.

No.  HomePods are WiFi only and audio passthrough is over HDMI connected to a Home Theater surround receiver, so the receiver's Dolby circuitry can handle the Dolby TrueHD or Dolby Atmos processing, rather than the AppleTV handling the audio processing.  The HomePod is just a speaker.

eightzero said:

Please tell me that this isn't because Apple wants to ram (!) AI down our collective throats. Could we please just have non-AI OS support for these machines?

You can turn off Apple Intelligence, even on Apple Silicon Macs. It is not required.

It is not the same A18 chip.  The iPhone 16e has a binned chip with less GPU cores.