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Having worked on HMD optical designs, lenses can be designed to tolerate a wide variation of users with some degradation that isn’t too bad, but if you want to maximize stuff like field of view and brightness and other things, you can end up with a tiny spot that the eyes need to be in. If they’ve decided to do a more optimized lens design, they might have more strict eye box requirements.
The other important part here is that inflation is lower this year than last. So the extra high raises last year may have helped keep up but aren’t needed as much.
As far as I can tell there’s no direct relationship between iPhone sales and the change in raises. If anything I’d expect low sales to lead to layoffs or closing stores.