….but fear not, the big picture and the big surprises, capital new shovelfuls of the hottest dirt that has sat under embargo or deliberate neglect over the past two months (that itself being one of the “big picture” things we’ll be getting to in the next week or so as we spin up this site’s engines properly) will be coming to you soon enough.

For now, read on to the full article for our first shotgun-blast of details and tidbits that found themselves at the top of our lists as we emerge from the proverbial Bat Cave with our old friends the Bothans and the old-school sources collectively known as the “Drunken Infinite Loop Dwellers Anonymous” (D.I.L.D.A.)…..you ain’t seen nothin’ yet and here’s a (small) taste of what’s to come.

Obviously, among the hottest and most controversial topics during our hiatus was the introduction of the new 13 and 15-inch Macbooks based on nvidia chipsets with dual “GP-GPU” coprocessors; one “integrated” utilizing the new, faster DDR3 system memory and the other “dedicated” with its own GDDR4 graphics RAM.

Along with their other traits, these remarkable one-piece-framed aluminum laptops have eliminated Firewire 400 and generally greatly hampered use of Firewire across the board. Performance of the 15-inch model’s Firewire 800 port in certain applications is also an emerging issue according to reader feedback.

We’ll be digging much deeper into those controversial issues, the future of the Macbooks including the forthcoming 17-inch model, and Apple’s use of chipsets by companies other than Intel as one of our first in-depth articles in the coming days’ queue.

For now….the tidbit we’d like to share on this front is that our sources among the “Bothans,” our very oldest and best sources at the highest levels within Infinite Loop, report any concern about the other Macbooks should be largely silenced by the impressive lineup of options coming down the pipe in new high-end models.

The 17-inch we’ve been led to expect thus far is a big part of that solution but not all of it — among the surprises we’re told to expect at Macworld San Francisco are the first quad-core Macbook Pro, powerful new dual-GPU designs by nVIDIA that will employ stunning SLI technology….and following soon thereafter, a 12-core Mac Pro(!).

If that weren’t enough, we’ve got a rapid-fire list of some red-hot rumors that we don’t want to hold back for full in-depth articles; we’ll get to them on each of these subjects in the days ahead, but as we “reboot” Mac OS Rumors…..we want to spin things up properly.

Accordingly, here are some of the latest breaking rumors crossing our desks this week:

• Mac OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard” will be announced early next year to be significantly ahead of schedule and fairly dramatic new features will be added to the already impressive list with part of that ‘extra’ time. The new release projection is approximately around the time of the Worldwide Developer Conference next July.
• Although working with AMD processors and ATi/AMD system chipsets in the lab, Intel’s Core 2 and Xeon chipsets will continue to rule Apple’s desktop as nVIDIA’s are now coming to dominate its Macbooks. No AMD processors are expected to ship in a Mac until at least 2011 but some of the company’s ‘embedded’ chips could show up in iDevices by mid-2009(!)….
• Apple will announce powerful new graphics/coprocessing chips being developed in-house for its hand-held and other iDevice offerings that will improve display resolutions by 2-5X in the next year and OpenGL ES rendering performance by 8-20X(!) on the next generation iPhone….in its high-end incarnation, at least. Sony’s PSP is in deep doo-doo!
• 3G “tethering” cellular internet data access plans for the iPhone will be better and cheaper than currently predicted, according to reliable sources at AT&T…..that suggests the price could be less than the currently rumored $30 but thus far no one at Apple appears to be willing to confirm that for Rumors. Details soon.

Expect multiple pages of additional hot tidbits in the hours ahead and full articles on these subjects as well as many others here on the original mac rumor site!