Why did they ruin it? It's due to smartphones that I've had a similar experience on at least one occasion. I couldn't find my phone, but I noticed it was connected to the home Wi-Fi network and, since it was a jailbroken iPhone, I could SSH into it. (It went to sleep aggressively, of course, but I woke it up by dialing the number or something.) While the iPhone has a built-in feature to remotely play a tone on the speaker, I couldn't seem to hear it from anywhere in the house. So I tried using a command-line tool (might have written it actually, don't remember) to activate the cameras and take a picture with each; unfortunately the result was just two dark blurs. Eventually I found it buried in a couch, the soft fabric muffling the speaker...
If I were more sophisticated, I could have measured Wi-Fi RSSIs from it, or tried to bring Bluetooth devices into range. Lots of ways to try to find things nowadays, but none perfect!