I got a deal through a third party apple reseller and still paid around $2300. This was late 2012 and I am still typing on it today with no desire to upgrade. 3 years on one machine is an eternity from me.
I got the 512 SSD so I could run multiple OS's and not worry about still having room for any media I might want. I still have ~80gb free with all my mp3's and VM's. 16GB of ram and a retina display as well.
I get the "apple hate". I really do. I have 3 laptops total in my life (Chromebook Pixel and Debian HP Stream 11 which serve very different purposes) and I still feel that the OSX is the best Unix based operating system for productivity in my market (startup/web development).
Maybe when Linux display tools wrap their head around high dpi displays, my opinion will change (Chromebook Pixel handles it very well so it must be coming!) but I really urge anyone who says "I personally will not buy anything from Apple" to reconsider why they're saying that.
Even Microsoft is making some pretty awesome choices these days, so I for one would never rule out the possibility of someone woo-ing me.
..a brief aside on the price... if I bought this for $2300 in December 2012, then I used it for all of 2013, 2014 and 5 months in 2015. 29 months of use. That's $79 a month invested in the thing I MAKE MY LIVING with. The price is only bad if you compare it to other "comparable" laptops. If you can get 3 years out of a $1,000 laptop without it slowing down your work, then props to you. I personally never could do that (even with other apple devices. Just try and think about the big picture when you purchase your dev machine, whatever make/model it could be :)