The world's biggest container ship, and the $29 billion iPhone question

In March 2021 the Ever Given wedged itself sideways across the Suez Canal, and a photo of a bulldozer dwarfed beside its hull made the scale of modern container ships suddenly obvious. The ship blocking the canal wasn't even the biggest afloat that year — and one estimate that circulated in 2021 put a single giant ship's cargo space at roughly $29 billion, if it were loaded with nothing but iPhones.

Container capacity is measured in twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU) — a unit based on the volume of a standard 20-foot shipping container, about 33.2 cubic metres inside. A 40-foot container, the more common size in practice, counts as 2 TEU. It's an imperfect measure — real cargo comes in odd shapes, and containers vary in height — but it's the industry's standard yardstick for comparing ships and ports.

The largest ship afloat in 2021

At the start of 2021, the largest container ship in the world was HMM Algeciras, delivered by South Korea's HMM in April 2020. Built by Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering, it measures 399.9 metres long and 61 metres wide, and carries up to 23,964 TEU. It held the title for barely over a year: in mid-2021, Evergreen's Ever Ace, built at Samsung Heavy Industries, nudged narrowly ahead at 23,992 TEU — a margin of just 28 containers between the two largest ships on Earth.

Two ships fewer than 30 boxes apart held the title of world's-biggest-container-ship within months of each other in 2021 — proof that around 24,000 TEU, not any single vessel, is where the top of the fleet had settled.

That's already a long way from where the record stood 15 years earlier. When Maersk's Emma Mærsk entered service in 2006, it was declared at roughly 11,000 TEU — itself a record at the time, though naval architects later estimated its true capacity closer to 14,000–15,000 TEU under normal counting rules. By 2021 the largest ships had more than doubled even the conservative, declared 2006 figure.

The $29 billion iPhone question — an estimate, not an invoice

In 2021 a comparison did the rounds suggesting that HMM Algeciras, if loaded with nothing but iPhones, would be carrying roughly $29 billion of cargo. That's a striking number, but it's worth being clear about what kind of number it is: an illustration built from a chain of assumptions, not a customs manifest. Ships don't carry a single product end to end, and phones typically move by air freight or in small mixed consignments — not stacked loose, container after container, on one hull.

Rebuilding the arithmetic starts with the box. A 20-foot TEU has about 33.2 cubic metres of interior space. If it were packed edge-to-edge with nothing but slim iPhone retail boxes (roughly 15 x 9 x 3cm, the smaller packaging Apple introduced from the iPhone 12 onward, once the charger and EarPods were dropped from the box), the theoretical geometric maximum runs into tens of thousands of handsets per container — a ceiling no real ship ever reaches, because retail cartons travel palletised, with dead space for cushioning, stacking limits and loading clearance.

Using the packing density that circulated in 2021 commentary on iPhone shipping economics — about 1,330 boxed phones per TEU, equivalent to roughly 2,660 per 40-foot container — HMM Algeciras's 23,964 TEU works out to around 31.9 million handsets. At the simple average of the 2021 iPhone 12 launch lineup (from $729 for the base iPhone 12 mini to $1,399 for a maxed-out iPhone 12 Pro Max, averaging $1,064), that comes to roughly $34 billion: the same broad order of magnitude as the "$29 billion" figure that made the ship famous, if not an exact match. The packing-density figure itself is a widely repeated rule of thumb from freight commentary, not an audited stowage plan, so treat the whole exercise as an estimate rather than a fact.

For scale: Apple sold around 197 million iPhones worldwide across all models in its 2020 financial year. So a single ship's illustrative, iPhones-only cargo would, on paper, be worth more than half a year of the entire planet's iPhone sales — loaded onto one hull.

Why size keeps climbing, and where it stops

Shipbuilders keep scaling up because bigger hulls carry more cargo per crew member, per engine, per litre of fuel burned — the economics of scale that have driven container shipping since the 1960s. But growth isn't unlimited. Ships this size are constrained by the availability of large enough engines, by ports able to load and unload them, and by the maximum dimensions that chokepoints like the Suez Canal and the Singapore Strait can physically accommodate.

The Ever Given made that constraint visible. On 23 March 2021, the roughly 20,000 TEU ship was pushed sideways by strong winds and ran aground across the canal, blocking traffic in both directions for six days until it was refloated on 29 March. More than 300 vessels backed up at either end while it sat wedged in place — a reminder that even a ship one class size below the 2021 record-holders was large enough to bring one of the world's busiest shipping lanes to a complete halt.

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