Is it just me or do these fleet tablets have a built-in self-destruct timer?Solved

They have been doing this to enterprise gear for a decade. It is just more obvious now because everything is sealed with industrial adhesive. 

You cannot even swap a battery in under an hour anymore without risking a punctured lithium cell. But the real crime is not the hardware, it is the firmware. Notice how that last major OS patch added a bunch of background telemetry processes that conveniently max out your older processors? They release PR statements saying they are “optimizing battery life” by throttling performance, but we all know it is just a tactic to make the device feel unbearably slow, so you buy the new one. 

We stopped buying from vendors who solder their RAM and glue their batteries. We switched our whole field team over to rugged, modular tablets last year specifically to escape this trap. 

@laura123 is spot on about the firmware throttling, but honestly, fighting the hardware design is a losing battle. The manufacturers make way too much money on these forced refresh cycles to ever change their ways unless right to repair legislation forces them to. 

We stopped trying to keep devices alive for five years. We just moved our entire hardware budget to a leasing model. We lease the fleet for 36 months, and the second the batteries start failing and the OS gets sluggish, we ship them right back to the vendor in exchange for the new models. Let the vendor deal with their own electronic waste. 

If you are buying standard consumer tablets for enterprise use and expecting them to last half a decade, you are just setting your helpdesk up for misery.