Has Apple reached the limits of the beautiful with its new iPhones? This has been a good week for new products, but a bad week for beauty. Garish iPhones, a swollen lumpy Jaguar and charmless plastic banknotes. Have we reached the historical moment when beauty is exhausted? There's no question that a very large part of Apple's astonishing success has been due to "applied art" (the old term for "design"). Perhaps not every i-customer actually realised it, but they were buying a bit of the Bauhaus: products that practised and appealed to a rational intelligence. The German architect Heinrich Tessenow estabished the Holy Writ of this belief system: "Das Einfache ist nicht immer das Beste. Aber das Beste ist immer einfach. "The simple is not always best, but the best is always simple." With astonishing commitment, Apple's head designer, Jony Ive, combined German art-school methodology with a Zen concentration and expert knowledge of advanced materials-processing to create products of exceptional visual and tactile beauty. Apple's design makes the technology disappear behind a beautiful carapace. Ive learnt this - and learnt it very well - from the product designer Dieter Rams, who said machines should be as efficient and as reticent as an English butler. The best design, Rams said, was as little design as possible. But that in itself was an artful subterfuge, especially as refined by Ive (now Sir Jonathan). There is nothing simple about Apple. Its subtle beauty is as highly contrived as it is highly popular. Yet Platonic form and exquisite Bauhaus logic only go so far. Beauty has its limits. You cannot take aesthetic refinement beyond the iPhone 5, as this week's confused and lacklustre product reveal of new iPhones confirmed. The existing machine is aesthetically perfect - so now there is nowhere else to go, beyond circus colourways and trick effects. Apple may have run out of art. The terrible truth about beauty is that, ultimately, it is boring. People begin to crave accident (which language tells us is the opposite of design) as well as variety. So while Apple's achievement was a great affirmation of the old rhetoric about beauty making best-sellers, it has also become a warning that too much beauty can be bad for you. Like Jony Ive at Apple, charged with the impossible task of continually improving on perfection, Ian Callum at Jaguar has one of the worst jobs in the world. Callum's job is to create new Jaguars which somehow acknowledge a tradition of great automobile beauty, but avoid slavish copyism. So Callum is badly stuck. If he imitates the Jaguars of the past, he is accused of pitiable plagiarism. Strike out for fresh ground, however - as this week's new project does - and the grumblers always say: "But it is no E-Type." Thus, the Jaguar CX-17, a five-door family 4x4 that will create 1,700 new jobs but inspire no poets. For some time now, beauty has been a problem for the automobile industry. Ten years ago, BMW (whose pioneering department of Kunstlerische Gestaltung - "Artistic Form" - was established as long ago as the Thirties) got bored with aesthetic refinement and began to make cars that were confrontational rather than soothing. "Ugly," they were called. But they have succeeded. The truth here is not that ugliness is a problem. It's beauty that's the nuisance. Albert Camus said: "Beauty drives us to despair, offering for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time." So ugliness is superior for a very simple reason: it lasts longer. Just check out that new five-pound note. Waterproof, indestructible - and perfectly repellent. Stephen Bayley's latest book is 'Ugly - The Aesthetics of Everything