The OP asks about ‘state actors’. It is believable that the context is industrial espionage (although it is not stated). The context is stated as “China”. “sophisticated” and “well-funded” are credible.
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It’s worth noting that bluetooth has been considered pretty insecure for quite a while. BT5 supposedly improves things marginally, but turning on support for older BT is a poor idea. Windows, Linux, doesn’t really matter.
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Can he really be surprised. My guess is he loves this. (speaking about Mueller-Maguhn)
Does the iPad, which is constantly bragging about how thin and small it is, really not use a combined wifi / bluetooth card? I would think it was a combo card, and that if it was removed, via stunting, or desoldering then bluetooth couldn’t be a vector either.
Does Apple support NFC? That could be a vector.
It probably does. I was writing in response to the note above that someone found a discrete rather than theoretical attack on the Linux BT stack. This should not be a surprise given the nature of BT.
The iPhone has an NFC chip. It uses NFC for its phone Apple payments. The API is not opened to developers.
I don’t know about the iPad though.
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I would suspect a simple piece of code that collects information when the laptop is not connected to any communications hardware. Then when you eventually connect to the internet, it phones home and uploads everything it collected previously. That code could be anywhere from a hard drive to an embedded chip. We don’t have access to most of the code running on those Chinese chips.