Governmental regulations for expansion of e-waste and customers’ awareness of green goods drive remanufacturing practices in high-technology electronic products. Selling remanufactured high-technology products is a challenge because of the shorter residual life of usage and potential cannibalisation of new items. Smartphones and tablets, as hi-tech products, are replaced by new generation models quickly due to rapid development. Products belonging to earlier generations become less demanding. Customer’s acceptance for outmoded remanufactured items is even less. Learning how value depreciated is vital for the sellers to make a wise price decision for these new and remanufactured products belonging to various generations. This study leverages transaction data of iPhones and iPads from eBay, uses partial least square method to explore the factors that affect value depreciation rate and price differentiation between new and remanufactured products. Variables which are categorised as marketing elements, technology features, appearance design, and customer attention are hypothesised to be critical to value depreciation. The result differs in iPhones and iPads but shows some consistency that time since release, product thickness, camera resolution, and fans/hits ratio are highly correlated to the value depreciation rate. ApplePay slows down the rate for iPhones while cellular data function accelerates the rate for iPads.

New generations of high-technology products are frequently launched before the previous model is sold out. Customers have an incentive to end the use of their old product and purchase a new one with the latest technological innovations. The unsold old models become less attractive, while the supply of remanufactured products from end-of-use products is uncertain in time, quantity, and quality. Other than adjusting the price, upgrading the returning unsold new products may be a source of remedy. This study provides profit maximization models associated with customer choice demand functions based on manufacturer, retailer, and joint supply chain scenarios. Two acquisition strategies are compared: acquire end-of-use products only and collect both end-of-use products and unsold old-style new products. The results reveal that returning the optimal quantity of overstocked new products brings about a greater benefit in all scenarios. Compared to the remanufacturer, the retailer is the optimal undertaker for collecting used products. In addition to this, slow technological development of the new-generation model causes a decrease in profit for the manufacturer. The optimal quantity of new products to be bought back decreases, because both the manufacturer and the retailer prefer to promote unsold outmoded products rather than upgrade the used products.