updates? pah! You're having a giraffe! Apple does NOT give a sh!t about your old software and why should they? In fact they don't really care about many third party programs, even Quick Books has had to sort their lives out. They were using Rosetta to run their program on the new Macs because it was out dated and originally written for the OLD Power PC architecture, lucky for them Apple provided Rosetta in the first place, Quick Books never did rewrite their program to conform to the new architecture and relied on Rosetta to do the translation and too run it - oops that was pulled from Lion and screwed over lots of users
Moral of the story is to check that your old software will run on a Mac (or Windows even) if it's using a newer operating system to what you currently are, same goes for upgrading, check the website for all your main software packages. It's something most people take for granted on Windows because it's so backwards compatible for most things and generally it will just work.
